[GeorgeKangas]

"you don't have conscious experience, you only think you do."

That's what illusionism, the position of Keith Frankish, asserts. Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish.

For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descartes).

Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.

[naasking]

> Dennett mostly seems to support it, as you note, but more equivocally than Frankish.

I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion.

> For those of us who have subjective experience (SE), and are aware of it: SE is the thing, which we know must exist (as noted by Descsartes).

Descartes begged the question. Just deconstruct it: "I think therefore I am" presupposes the existence of "I" right at the very start. Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment. Where are "you" exactly? The argument is fallacious and implies fallacious conclusions which led to mind/body dualism.

The non-fallacious version is "this is a thought, therefore thoughts exist". This is undeniably true, and yet it does not imply the existence of an "I" or any kind of dualism between mind and matter. A thought would then simply be a specific material structure (edit: or rather, it's a particular logical structure that can be embodied as a material structure).

> Anyone doubting the existence of SE, either is not having SE (i.e. is a "phenomenological zombie"), or (more likely, IMO) has not identified his own SE.

Anyone doubting subjective experience has simply recognized that every prior claim to human specialness has failed spectacularly, that science has repeatedly shown that our obvious and intuitive grasp of perception and truth is fatally flawed in numerous ways, and therefore that we should not in a million years trust anything that we immediately perceive as completely obvious when it can be demonstrated quite easily that these perceptions are vague and often false.

For christ's sake, your senses are telling you that water breaks pencils [1], and that you're burning up when you're dying of cold [2], and you're telling me that your internal perceptions of your subjective experience, arguably the most sophisticated part of your brain, is some kind factual oracle? Sorry, that's just nonsense. You should be immensely skeptical of your perceptions, looking both for justification that they are true or explanations for why you think they are true, you should not be treating them as simply a priori true.

[1] https://scienceathomekids.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/IMG...

[2] https://psichologyanswers.com/library/lecture/read/76624-do-...

[pcwalton]

I always found illusionism completely nonsensical, for the reasons that Galen Strawson put forth in "Realistic Monism" [1] (emphasis mine):

> Some of them — Dennett is a prime example — are so in thrall to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they are prepared to deny the existence of experience, more or less (c)overtly, because they are committed to physicalism, i.e. physicSalism.

> "‘They are prepared to deny the existence of experience.’ At this we should stop and wonder. I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid, at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. I find this grievous, but, next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green.

[1]: https://www.sjsu.edu/people/anand.vaidya/courses/c2/s0/Reali...

[naasking]

By contrast, Strawson is so enthralled with the primacy of experience that he can easily dismiss the demonstrable facts that literally everything his experience is telling him is a fiction (the world is not classical, there is no continuity of self, that our perceptions reflect evolutionary fitness and not truth, etc., etc.), and yet still maintain that experience itself must somehow be an exception. Pretty absurd indeed.

[darkscape]

It can't be "literally everything". It is experience that enables us to correct those misconceptions in the first place. It is by experiencing that we discovered and experimentally confirmed quantum theory i.e. that "the world is not classical". It is by reflecting on his experiences that Dennett came to his conclusions.

[naasking]

It is reason that permits us to correct those errors, not phenomenal experience. Our perceptions and "experiences" deceive us all of the time, and through reason we have found many of those flaws. Consciousness is the final boss fight, and the battle has begun:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00...

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> I believe Dennett is an eliminative materialist, so he would consider qualia to be an illusion.

That's correct, mostly, but it also means this position is nonsensical.

What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.

Dennett tries to finesse this, but in my opinion fails. I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.

[GeorgeKangas]

Dennett's position makes perfect sense -- if Dennett is a zombie. For a zombie, to whom subjective experience (SE) is not even a thing, the "hard problem" can only mean: why do people talk about SE? So that's what they set about explaining.

However, I don't think Dennett (or any human) is actually a zombie. The difficulty, is getting people to recognize their own SE. Our vocabulary, all about material and mechanisms, can't actually define SE. Instead, we have a few ostensions by which an attentive experiencer might recognize his own SE:

[Descartes] SE is that one thing, which absolutely must exist.

[Nagel] SE is "what it's like, to be...". He adds, that all our science is fully consistent with SE not existing. That's why it makes perfect sense for a zombie to believe it doesn't exist.

[Jackson]: Mary knows what seeing red is like, only when she has seen red.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

I think it is preposterous to suggest that Dennett is not recognizing his own SE.

Dennett, however, requires that the mysterious part of his own SE must be explainable by a non-mysterious aspect of SE. He just doesn't have any proposal for what or how that could be. He wants to wave his hands and say, "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"

[naasking]

> He just doesn't have any proposal for what or how that could be. He wants to wave his hands and say, "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"

I don't think this gives Dennett enough credit, because what our instruments are all telling us is that there no single, indivisible "self" at all; we are all made up of constituent parts either none of which have consciousness themselves (eliminativism), or all of which must have consciousness (pansychism), because ineffable qualia cannot simply appear from nothing. This reddit post does a great job breaking down Dennett's position sensibly:

https://reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/shneug/can_someo...

[PaulDavisThe1st]

From that post;

> There's no one thing, not even a collection of things, that can be identified with what we think of as the conscious mind. Instead, we've got a whole bunch of different things, none of which has "consciousness" in a traditional sense, and these come together in a way that makes it seem as though we're conscious.

I just don't buy this at all. This seems precisely as I described it:

> "well, we have detectors for this and that and these predictive capabilities and these modelling systems, and so ... ta-da, we're conscious!"

Also, note the heavy lifting being done by "makes it seem" from the Reddit quote. This goes back to the basic problem: Dennett (and the authors in TFA) are describing what we are conscious of, what makes up our consciousness, but he and they are not addressing how it possible for there to be any subjective experience at all.

I would go a little further, even: the whole reason why there is a sense of self is precisely because there is a singular subjective experience. You can figure out what drives that experience, and even note that it isn't rooted in any kind of singular and/or stable physical system, and that's actually really interesting. But that's not addressing how subjective experience is possible at all.

[naasking]

> What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.

I think that's incorrect, as it relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed.

> I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.

No, what he's saying is that there is no "you" to experience anything, there are only scattered but correlated thoughts that are stitched together in a way that produces a false conclusion that there is a "you".

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Where does that false conclusion occur? What is the entity in which it occurs?

There is no "conclusion" here in the sense of "2+2=4". What is at stake is not a reasoned, or evidential analysis of how the world is. It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).

Regardless of whether there is a singular "you" or, in Minsky's term, a "society of mind" (or self, to line up with Dennett a little more), something enjoys subjective experience, and you call that that "you". It doesn't really matter how it arises, whether it accurately reflects the operations of the brain/body: the existence of subjective experience creates a self.

[naasking]

> It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).

What is in dispute here is what "subjective experience" means. If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description, then we can agree that it exists and that our observations are actually evidence of its existence.

But this is not what most people mean by this term, and it is that term that is a fiction on the eliminativist view.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description,

Now we get to the heart of it (and the reason why consciousness is and has been such a difficult problem): I do not agree that this is true.

[loganmhb]

The question is not whether perceptions are true -- that's irrelevant. Undoubtedly perceptions present a skewed and unreliable view onto reality. It's whether they exist at all. You can't trick someone who isn't looking.

> Except everybody knows there is no "I", you're just a bundle of atoms, and a bundle that's changing from moment to moment.

This is begging the question in the other direction.

[naasking]

> The question is not whether perceptions are true -- that's irrelevant. Undoubtedly perceptions present a skewed and unreliable view onto reality. It's whether they exist at all.

Perceptions are not experience. Nobody denies the existence of perceptions, the question is whether perceptions carry something "extra", something "ineffable" that we call "qualitative experience", something that cannot even in principle be captured by a third person objective description.

Algorithms and machines arguably have perceptions but not experience. Eliminativism is the position that we don't have experience either, we're only a collection of perceptions arranged in such a way that it leads us to the conclusion that our experience is real.

> This is begging the question in the other direction.

I'm not begging the question because I'm not saying eliminativism is true because matter is all we can measure. I'm simply saying that it's demonstrably true that by every measure currently available, we are just a bundle of atoms changing from moment to moment. The only people who claim otherwise and are given any kind of credibility, are people who cite fallacious thought experiments like Mary's room as "evidence". Not very compelling frankly.

[GeorgeKangas]

Very well then: you either don't have SE, or don't recognize your own SE. My guess is the latter.

I don't think SE is exclusive to humans, but only humans talk about it, as far as we know.