[wildmusings]

Dennett’s arguments are very frustrating because he refuses to engage with the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience, and how it could arise from physical processes. In dismissing this problem, he doesn’t do much more than simply refuse to engage with it. “Consciousness Explained”? More like consciousness denied.

For example, he insists that our consciousness isn’t quite as broad as we think, and presents ample evidence to show the we are aware of much less than we think we are. Great, but totally irrelevant for explaining the fundamental phenomenom of subjective experience. And yet it is presented as evidence that the phenomenon is really not a problem at all.

What makes this even more frustrating is that the existence of subjective experience is really the only thing one can be absolutely sure of in this world (see Descartes and also the brain in a vat thought experiment). And yet it is the one thing that Dennett refuses to acknowledge.

[mrmyers]

In Consciousness Explained, Dennet is deliberately not dealing with that problem because he had already written his thesis, a book, and several papers on the subject of content and qualia and that sort of argument. He was also a student of Quine, who had his own rather extensive criticisms of the notion of intentionality and subjective experience. As such, he decided to leave that particular sort of discussion out, and just focus on his main objective (as he remarks in the appendix).

The following papers represent I think a pretty good summary of his response to the sort of objection you raise. They might not be the best, but they seem to be the ones that come to mind at least for me.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/JCSarticle.pdf

The first is an extensive attack on the notion of qualia as a useful notion. The second explains the methodological approach implicit to rejecting this sort of notion, especially in the social/psychological sciences.

[erasemus]

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/quinqual.htm

>What are qualia, exactly?

Sets of associated ideas? For example, a door knob might be associated with (1) wood, (2) black, (3) grasping, (4) turning, (5) my right hand. All these ideas are activated to some degree when I contemplate the door knob, and to a greater degree when I contemplate myself contemplating the door knob.

[pygy_]

I'd say: subsets of the perceptual/cognitive space.

[ci5er]

We absolute can be aware of subjective experience/awareness.

Hawkins posited in "On Intelligence" that consciousness is simply the feeling of having a neo-cortex.

While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real", I really don't have any basis for believing/thinking that they could arise from anything else other than from physical quanta hitting my senso-sphere and being interpreted by a biological machine.

I also have no basis for not thinking/believing that this is not nonsense.

How you you break the conundrem of primary-physics vs primary-mind?

[lawpoop]

> While I am as baffled as any/many at having subjective qualia appear so "real"

Appear so real compared to what?

Are you claiming that your experience of your own thoughts are subjectively more real than your experience of your sensory perceptions?

[escape_goat]

It's a bit tricker than it sounds, though. We cannot be aware of the absence of awareness. This could imply that we can only be aware of a sense of 'awareness' insofar as it was in fact differentiated from awareness itself, though a missing second step that is probably familiar to you (but it's a bit late at night for me to articulate it coherently).

[ci5er]

Are you referring to nothingness?

I think that most of us can remember being 'nothing' (this might be wrong), and it baffles me why people are afraid to die, which is simply returning to 'nothing'.

[wildmusings]

That’s a preposterous claim. You obviously can’t remember not existing. Memory is not magical, it is a biological process that records information during your life and allows you to reexperience it.

[ci5er]

It's a boundary condition. I expressed myself badly.

EDIT: If you are a physicalist. Some people are not.

EDIT2: "The Truth" has nothing to do with whether one is a physicalist or not, but the interpretation of some various sub-sets of the facts inform various ... schools of thought.

[bhouston]

I agree with Dennett though. Our consciousness is fairly limited compared to what our brains do automatically for us. I guess I do not think qualia is an important thing. Remember they have figured out how things of things in the mind works -- it just stimulates the higher level recognition cells itself rather that letting them be stimulated by our senses. The hard stuff to understand it the more abstrwct thoughts like numbers, math and things that are a few steps awqy from senses, this is also something we havent got our deep neural networks to do either.

[abiox]

> the fundamental problem of explaining the existence of subjective experience

(honest) why is this a problem? what's the difference between my "experience" and the experience of, say, a film camera?

[lawpoop]

If you don't think it's a problem, then it's not. There's no real way, presently, to prove there isn't a difference.

Likewise, I could say there is no difference between my experience of satiation after eating, and the experience of a garbage can being filled full. If you don't think there's a problem with that, fine. No way to show there isn't. However, people inclined to agree with your film example might not be inclined to agree with my satiation example.

Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision? Does a corpse experience vision as much as you do?

[jldugger]

> Is there any difference between light falling in your eyes and your experience of vision, and light falling in a corpses eyes, and its experience of vision?

One would argue that there's more chemistry going on in neurons feeding to the optic center, but I'm not well versed in neuroscience to tell you where the signal stops.

[lawpoop]

Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness?

What is the implication for the conscious experience of the camera?

[jldugger]

> Is the amount of chemistry, then, or length of signal transmission, the measure of consciousness?

Sure, but we're gonna limit ourselves to neurons and the degree of connectivity between them. A camera has none, QED. The more challenging comparison is between a comatose patient and one with locked-in syndrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locked-in_syndrome. There, we can't exactly come up with some 'an agent capable of sensing the world, and responding to changes in its environment' that an outside observer might use.

[erasemus]

The camera doesn't have (1) an attentional system, (2) a model of the world in memory, (3) a model of itself within that model.

[sgt101]

for humans with cultures (4) a way to create and impose narratives (5) narratives about the world

[dorgo]

(4) and (5) are included in (2) and (3), aren't they?

[dcre]

Consciousness Explained Away!