Daniel C. Dennett (1996), Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(1), 4–6, Imprint Academic: the opening paper of “Explaining Consciousness — The ‘Hard Problem’ (Part 2)”, a special issue edited by Jonathan Shear. Dennett’s copy is in the Tufts Digital Library.
Key takeaways
- The vitalist’s hard problem. Quoted from Consciousness Explained (pp. 281–282): a vitalist who grants that reproduction, metabolism, self-repair and the rest are explained, and still asks about “life itself”, has imagined something he cannot imagine.
- Crock’s hard problem of perception. A neuroscientist who set perception aside “and hope[d] for the best” would have built an artifactual problem that dissolves as the easy work is done, the error of treating vision as television. Crick’s closing remark that he has “said almost nothing about qualia … except to brush it to one side and hope for the best”, which Dennett reads as adopting Chalmers’s distinction, risks the same error.
- Chalmers’s distinction begs the question. “Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience?” can be asked of life too. Chalmers’s reply, that the explanation of functions does not suffice for experience as a conceptual point, is “flatly mistaken”: what makes people wonder about consciousness is its “remarkable functions”.
- The introspective catalogue. Delight and dismay, distraction and concentration, foreboding, obsessions and oversights, the limit on items held at once: all are functions or dispositions. “Subtract them away, and nothing is left beyond a weird conviction (in some people) that there is some ineffable residue.”
- Cutism. Mass, charge and space-time are fundamental because independent evidence drove physicists to them. Positing experience as fundamental needs the same, or it is like positing cuteness. Until it is given, the proposal “can be put on the back burner”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request for Dennett. It is the reply to Chalmers’s “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-406, read in NOTE-336), which the record files at the same time, and it quotes that paper’s JCS pp. 203 and 209.
On the hard problem. The record now holds both sides of the exchange’s first round. The two disagree on one premise: whether the explanandum, experience, is fixed by the functions. Chalmers’s §5 argues that vitalism is disanalogous, because vitalists doubted that mechanisms could perform the functions, while for experience no function is in doubt. Dennett answers that the analogy holds at the level that matters: in both cases the residue is defined as whatever survives the explanation of every function. Neither paper offers evidence that would decide between them; each describes the other’s premise as a conceptual mistake. Seth (LIT-135, read in NOTE-169) takes the vitalism analogy further as the real-problem method; Frankish’s illusionism (LIT-103) is the later form of Dennett’s position. Chalmers’s “Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-425) can be read as a later response to exactly this challenge: it asks for an explanation of our judgment that there is a hard problem, which is what the “weird conviction” here would need. Chalmers’s direct reply to this issue’s papers (“Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness”, JCS 1997) is not filed.
On Block (LIT-407). The paper does not mention Block. Its subtraction argument is the converse of the absent-qualia intuition: Block asks the reader to imagine every function present and experience absent; Dennett asks the reader to remove every function and find that nothing is left. Neither is an argument the other accepts. My pairing.
On the society-of-mind bridge (THEORY-043). Not discussed by the paper. If Dennett is right that the residue is a conviction, the THEORY’s question, whether a nation has experience over and above its agency, has no further fact to settle. That is the same bearing as “Quining Qualia” (LIT-433) has, stated here for experience in general rather than for qualia.
On AI consciousness (THEORY-023). Not discussed. The paper’s position removes the gap THEORY-023 locates between behavioural or architectural evidence and experience; on it, the evidence for consciousness is evidence of the functions.
The book from which the vitalist passage is quoted is Consciousness Explained (LIT-443, filed unread), and Dennett’s 2016 restatement of the deflationary view as “illusionism” is LIT-434 (filed unread).
It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice, and it does not belong in the anthology.