PREMIUM-Ep. 400: Dennett Rejects Qualia (Part Three)

0:00Welcome to the show.

0:30So we had talked a lot about, he kind of takes in this chapter 12, Quality Disqualified, and goes through a number of the arguments that we have covered in our original Philosophy of Mind episode, right? So what is it like to be a bat? We talked for most of the second half. Somehow we got on, I mean, he does talk about animal consciousness in here, so it wasn't crazy, but we skipped over some of the other stuff.

1:00So section five, Epiphenomenal Qualia. Frank Jackson, his article about Mary the Color Scientist. Would you want to remind folks what that says? So I'll just read from the book. Not the whole thing, but this is Frank Jackson's much discussed case of Mary the Color Scientist who has never seen colors. This is a quote from Jackson in Dennett's book. Mary is a brilliant scientist who, for whatever reason, is forced to investigate the world from

1:33a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes of the sky, yadda-dy-yah. She discovers which wavelength combinations of sky stimulate the retina, how this produces via the central nervous system, the contraction of vocal cords, yadda-dy-yah, like that end up in the sky as blue. So what happens when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television

2:05monitor? It says, will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious she will learn something about the world in our visual experience of it, but then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. She had all the physical information, ergo, there's more to have than that, and physicalism is false. In essence, I think we said this a different way, Mark, on the other episode, just that the idea that even if you had all of the knowledge, everything that was necessary to explain how

2:39you are experiencing something, oh, it's this temperature, you're in this latitude, the surface is made up of this level of this type of material that has this microscopic structure, and the light is coming from the sun at this oblique angle through the clouds, yadda-dy-yah, reflecting on, and you can, so you can explain how all that adds up to the experience of the color red. The idea is that this, even if the scientist has all of that information, but has never

3:10actually seen red, the seeing of red is something super added or epiphenomenal on top of the physicalist account. Which, elsewhere in this book, Dennett has said, look, if you are explaining consciousness consciousness, and part of your explanatory language includes reference to consciousness, then you haven't explained it very well, have you? So, you know, this is a, I remember Davidson in the article that you were not on that episode

3:42to discuss, but you did read it, right? Right? You were, you know, compared it to the normative descriptive distinction, right? You could know all the descriptive information, so in fact, I think this word supervenience is something he attributes to G.E. Moore, I believe, who is the guy who came up with this sharp distinction to say, I mean, certainly Hume talked about is and ought, right? So this is clear, but I think the way that is currently formulated might have been so that

4:14Moore, in arguing about moral theories, said you could know, you know, if you're trying to reduce what is good to what is pleasurable, or what, you know, to the utility principle, to something like that, then you are missing the point that good is a sui generis, irreducible quality. Well, Jackson is saying the same is true of the mental. So you can't just say, well, the mental is the physical. Your conception of the, your experience of the color blue or that swatch of blue.

4:50Is just your brain doing such and such, or maybe it's not even, you know, maybe it's not a neurochemical explanation. Maybe it's a functional explanation. Any of those physical in some way explanations are not going to capture it because there is something irreducible. Yeah. And this thought experiment just introduces a whole host of complexities. I think that make it difficult. So, you know, the first is experiencing something and the explanation of that experience are two

5:24totally different things. And so to say like, I see red and I have all of the information necessary to explain this specific instance of me seeing red are two different things. And even having all of the information, isn't the actual experience of seeing red. So I'm not sure it's even constructed properly. And then it basically goes down that line because his complaint about the argument is it's like, you just sort of say, oh, she has all the information she needs.

5:57And it's like, well, what does that actually mean? It's not just, she has all of the input data, right? There's a whole host of other things that have to roll into this that she would have had to have had historically and experientially and all this in order to comprehend even the explanatory content. So I like the Mary example as a way of teasing out the idea that there is such a thing as qualia. But I'm not sure either for the reason Dennett cites or for some other reason that it ultimately

6:31holds together because I'm not even sure we're talking about the same thing. Like if you have never had the experience of this, having it explained to you does not make you an, you could become an expert on it. Let's just say you are an expert. You could answer anybody's questions about it, but you haven't had the experience of it. But phrasing it that way, isn't necessarily saying that the experience, have the experience of having the having of, what am I trying to say? The having of an experience versus the understanding or the knowledge of what that experience is

7:06doesn't necessarily mean that there's something that it's like to have that experience that's super added above all of the physical processes and all that. It just means experience is different than knowing, right? Praxis and theory. Yeah, I'm trying to think of other parallel examples, right? If you've never read, you've never read the Frank Jackson article, but you've heard people summarize it again and again and again, and maybe you've read little quotes like this. You would still think, well, if you actually, you know, sat down and read it straight through,

7:40that's an experience that you didn't have before. You didn't really know how, you know, you could point out something about the flow of his argument. I don't know from just looking at this, how punchy is he? Is he as fun to read as Nagel, that kind of stuff. But yet it seems like, you know, that might all be irrelevant, right? That you have, you actually did know everything there was to get out of it, especially if you've read summary after summary and discussion after discussion. In fact, you knew way more than

8:11Frank Jackson himself did when writing it because you've seen all the responses and you've, you know, thought about it in a way that he was not able to not existing later in time. Is that even relevant? I mean, yes, there is a, it seems like it's the same, right? You don't know, well, you didn't know the qualia involved in reading his words. You had the information. Maybe you had Claude sum it up for you, but you didn't have the experience. So it seems like it's, it's actually just the same problem. Yeah. I feel like there's another way we kind of couch this example that it would say it a

8:45different way. Let's classify what comes through your senses as one type of information, one type of data that your brain processes, right? And Dennett spends a lot of time talking about how, like for example, sight and hearing work. So there's information that comes from the actual, the experiential side of things. And then there's information that comes descriptively like, oh, let me tell you the wavelength of that particular beam of light. The wavelength is this mass of the

9:21atoms is that yada yada. And so to say that Mary has all the information she needs to be an expert on color. Well, she doesn't. If we believe that part of the information set to be able to say that you understand or are an expert on color is experiential has to come in, you have to gain that, that, that information through your senses, then Mary has some data, but not all the data. And so when she does

9:56actually experience red for the first time, she is definitely learning something new because she's getting new information. It's just not coded in terms of physical science or, you know, whatever paradigm that the world was explained to her. I feel like maybe this is just another little like red herring example, but I understand what it's supposed to do, which is to get you to feel like when you have an experience of something, something different happens that you can't, that isn't something that you can just understand, learn, explain, comprehend, right?

10:32There, there is something that it's like to have an experience as opposed to imagine something or be told something. That's really kind of what this seems like it's getting to for me. If that sounds like the kind of thing that you want to hear more about, then please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com slash support. Thanks for listening.