Contribution
It is the first published deflationary reply to the hard problem, written for the JCS symposium on Chalmers’s paper. It gives the hard problem’s critics their standard analogies: vitalism, a fictional neuroscientist “Crock” who postpones perception, and “cutism”. It also states the evidential challenge, that a fundamental posit needs data that drove us to it.
Key insight
Chalmers defines the hard problem as what is left after every function is explained. Dennett asks what anyone ever had in mind when they wondered about their own consciousness, and lists only functions. If that list is complete, the “hard problem” is the residue of an act of subtraction that leaves nothing, and the felt residue is a belief that something is left.
Assumptions
- The introspective catalogue is exhaustive. That everything that impresses one about one’s own consciousness is “‘merely’ the ‘performance of functions’ or the manifestation of various complex dispositions to perform functions” (p. 5). It is offered from the author’s own case.
- Theoretical posits need independent evidence (p. 6), as mass and charge had. This is a standard of scientific practice, stated, not argued.
- Analogy carries weight. The vitalist and Crock cases are taken to have the same structure as Chalmers’s; Chalmers’s disanalogy is what the paper disputes.
Key results
- Vitalism (§1). Quoting Consciousness Explained, pp. 281–282: the vitalist’s “residual mystery of life” is an imagination that has misfired.
- Crock (§2). A neuroscientist who said he had brushed perception aside would have created an artifactual hard problem, the error of “vision as television”. The paper says that postponing qualia is the same mistake, and that unless experience is broken into its functional components “from the outset” one creates “an imaginary dazzle in the eye of a Cartesian homunculus” (p. 5, citing Dennett 1995, a review of Damasio’s Descartes’ Error).
- “Almost unique.” Chalmers says the hard problem is “almost unique” in going beyond functions, but names no other case; his support “simply repeats the claim in different words” (p. 5). The quoted passage is Chalmers 1995, p. 203.
- The vitalism disanalogy rejected. Chalmers (p. 209) says that the vitalist doubted that mechanisms could perform the functions, while for experience the explanation of functions is not in question. Dennett: “I submit that he is flatly mistaken”. It is the remarkable functions that make people wonder.
- Cutism (p. 6). Nobody would take vitalism seriously had it not had independently describable phenomena to explain. Cuteness posited as fundamental would have none. Unless Chalmers gives “an independent ground” for adding experience to mass, charge and space-time, the proposal goes on “the back burner”. Roberts (1995) is quoted: “The evidential argument is circular.”
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The easy/hard distinction misdirects research and generates illusions | weak–moderate | by analogy with vitalism and with “Crock” (pp. 4–5) |
| C2 | Chalmers’s reason why experience is unlike life restates the claim | moderate as a reading of Chalmers 1995 pp. 203, 209 | close reading of two quoted passages |
| C3 | When every function is subtracted from one’s own consciousness, nothing is left but a conviction | assertion | the author’s introspective catalogue (p. 5) |
| C4 | Positing experience as fundamental requires independent evidence of the kind physics had for mass and charge, and none is given | moderate as a challenge | the cutism analogy; Roberts 1995 |
Concepts
- Crock. An imaginary neuroscientist who, substituting “perception” for Crick’s “qualia”, brushes perception aside to work on the easy problems.
- Cutism. The proposal to add cuteness to the fundamental properties of physics, because “some things are just plain cute” and it is hard to describe or explain (p. 6). A reductio for posits without independent evidence.
Connections
- Chalmers, “Facing Up” (LIT-406, NOTE-336). The target. Its C1 (the easy/hard division) and C5 (experience as fundamental, by analogy with charge) are what this paper attacks; its §5 vitalism disanalogy is the passage quoted. The two quotations (pp. 203, 209 in JCS) match the record’s reading of the author’s copy in substance. NOTE-336 records Chalmers’s C2 as resting on a conceivability premise defended in the book (LIT-441, filed unread); this paper does not engage that premise.
- Chalmers, “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness” (LIT-425). Not cited (it is later). It takes up what C3 here leaves unexplained, why people judge that a residue remains, and grants the deflationist the status of that question as an easy problem.
- Seth (LIT-135, NOTE-169). Uses the vitalism analogy against the hard problem in a later form.
- Frankish (LIT-103, NOTE-143). The later illusionist statement, with the same refusal to grant a residue.
- Damasio. The paper cites Dennett’s 1995 TLS review of Descartes’ Error, not a Damasio work the record holds. The record’s Damasio readings (LIT-384, LIT-388) are on somatic markers and the nature of feelings and do not bear on this exchange.
- “Quining Qualia” (LIT-433, NOTE-357). The same strategy for qualia: divide what is supposed to be the quale from its effects, and find either nothing or something relational.
Bearing on the record
- THEORY-043. The paper does not discuss groups. On its view, the THEORY’s narrowed dispute (whether a nation has experience over and above agency and awareness) has no further fact to be about. It does not supply a criterion either way. My inference.
- THEORY-023. Not discussed. On this paper’s view, the gap THEORY-023 finds between behavioural or architectural evidence and consciousness is the hard problem again, and closes as the functions are explained.
- No new THEORY. A THEORY on “whether the hard problem is a real explanandum” would need Chalmers’s 1997 reply, which is not filed.
- No ML instruction. Nothing here belongs in the anthology.
Limitations
- Three pages. It is a symposium reply; every argument is compressed and C3 is asserted.
- Analogies are contestable. Chalmers’s §5 already argued that vitalism is disanalogous; this paper repeats that it is analogous and does not add an argument about what makes it so, beyond C3.
- No positive theory here. It points to Consciousness Explained for one.
Open questions
- What would count, for Dennett, as the “independent ground” Chalmers owes? The paper does not say what data could support a fundamental posit about experience, so it is unclear whether the challenge could be met in principle.
- How did Chalmers answer? His “Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness” (JCS 4(1), 1997) replies to this symposium and is not filed.
Corrections
- none to a seeded skim (there was no seed)
- The brief’s citation (JCS 3(1):4–6, 1996) is correct.
- The brief calls it “his reply to Chalmers’s hard problem”. It is a reply to one paper, “Facing up to the problem of consciousness” (JCS 2(3):200–19, 1995), the only Chalmers work in its references.