NOTE-357: Dennett — Quining Qualia

Contribution

The paper moves the burden of proof. Before it, functionalists answered the absent- and inverted-qualia arguments by saying they could accommodate qualia. Dennett says they should have asked “What qualia?” (§2). He gives a catalogue of what qualia are supposed to be and a set of cases in which the marks come apart. It ends with an account of why experience seems to have such properties when it does not. It is the founding statement of qualia eliminativism, the position later called illusionism.

Key insight

Whatever is supposed to be the quale, as distinct from the subject’s reactions to it, sits somewhere in the causal stream between stimulus and judgment. Any change can be placed either upstream or downstream of that point with the same introspective and behavioural result. So nothing, neither introspection nor physiology, fixes where the quale is. A property whose presence nobody could detect, the subject included, cannot be the intimately known property qualia were supposed to be.

Assumptions

• Method. “Rigorous arguments only work on well-defined materials”, so the tools are intuition pumps, not formal arguments (§1). The conclusion is meant to shift intuitions, not to be derived.
• Target fixed by the tradition. The four marks are taken from the literature (§2). Dennett treats Shoemaker’s milder “qualitative or phenomenal features” definition and argues that “phenomenal” either means nothing definite or leads back to the four marks.
• Functional symmetry of the cases. The two surgeries in pump #6 and the two adaptation stories in pump #8 are stipulated to produce the same introspective effects. The argument needs this stipulation and does not defend it.
• No infallibilism. Dennett assumes that nobody now holds subjects infallible about their qualia (§4), and gives two reasons it would not help: infallibility bought by emptying the claim of content (Wittgenstein, Malcolm), or qualia as logical constructs of judgments, which makes them theorists’ fictions.
• Elimination as tactics. Endnote 2 says that the choice between eliminative and reductive materialism here is “not so much … a doctrinal issue as a tactical issue”. The paper’s “there are no qualia” should be read with that endnote.

Key results

• Intersubjective comparison is impossible even with ideal technology (pump #4, the Brainstorm machine). A device feeding your experience into my brain must be calibrated by our reports, so it returns us to the evidential starting point.
• Intrasubjective comparison is no better (pumps #5–#6). An “evil neurosurgeon” can invert an early channel (qualia inverted) or the memory-access links that compare today’s hues with those of yore (only reactions inverted). On waking the subject should say “either my qualia have been inverted or my memory-linked qualia-reactions have been inverted. I wonder which!” The memory link plays the role of the cable in pump #4.
• Chase and Sanborn (pump #7). Both tasters used to like the coffee and no longer do. Chase says his taste changed and the coffee tastes the same. Sanborn says his tasters changed and his standards did not. Each has three readings: one pole, the other, or a mixture. Third-person tests (blind retasting, physiology such as the area-18 response to illusory contours) can favour one pole in extreme cases. They cannot separate the components when the effects are small, and the subject’s own judgment is evidentially no better than a naive observer’s, “like … his own body temperature constancy”. What he can report with authority is that the relation between sipping and judging changed.
• Adaptation (pump #8). After surgical inversion of taste and full behavioural compensation, the physiology can locate the compensation, but not tell whether it lies before or after “the qualia phase”.
• The dilemma (§4). Either reactions are constitutive of the experienced quality (the experienced beer drinker, pump #9; the cauliflower pill, pump #11), and qualia are relational, not intrinsic; or they are not, and qualia are inaccessible to their owner. “We have to ask Chase which way he wants to go”, and the ordinary concept does not answer.
• Clinical cases (§5). Hemi-achromatopsia with insight (Damasio et al. 1980), colour-naming failure without awareness of deficit (Geschwind and Fusillo 1966), complaint with residual 50% guessing (Meadows 1974), and achromatopsia with prosopagnosia and full insight (Damasio et al. 1980). The qualia vocabulary gives no rule for describing them, and Dennett reports that philosophers he sampled disagreed “strident[ly]” about each.
• Replacement (§6).
  • Intrinsic: no accepted definition exists (Lewis 1983 is quoted failing to give one). Public redness and bitterness are relational, and nothing requires the relation to bottom out in an intrinsic property. Monetary value is the analogy.
  • Ineffable: practically ineffable, because a first experience (pump #13, the osprey cry) gives a property detector whose projection is untested and whose deliverance is too information-rich for a description, as the torn Jello box edge (pump #14) cannot be described without becoming a recipe for forging it.
  • Private: idiosyncrasy of discrimination profiles, empirically discoverable.
  • Homogeneous or atomic: functional invariability, close kin to Pylyshyn’s cognitive impenetrability, and plastic with training (pump #15, the guitar harmonic).
  • Bieri’s “phenomenal information properties” (pips) are offered as a respectable successor notion, with the caveat that calling them “phenomenal” is unjustified.

Claims

id	claim	strength	support
C1	The tradition’s qualia are ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly apprehensible	moderate as a reading of the literature	§2; Block and Shoemaker quoted; Dennett allows it “may strike many readers as tendentious”
C2	A subject cannot introspectively tell a change in qualia from a change in memory-linked reactions	moderate, given the stipulation of introspective equivalence	pumps #5–#6, #8; the equivalence is stipulated, not shown
C3	Third-person evidence can favour one pole in extreme cases but cannot settle small mixtures, and is better evidence than the subject’s own convictions	moderate	pump #7; inductive testing; the area-18 example; no data on taste
C4	If reactions are constitutive of how things seem, qualia are relational; if not, they are inaccessible; the folk concept does not choose	moderate as a dilemma	pumps #9–#12; it rests on C2
C5	Real achromatopsia cases defeat any rule for describing them in qualia terms	weak–moderate	four quoted case excerpts and an “informal sampling” of philosophers
C6	Practical ineffability is the information richness of an untested property detector	moderate as an analysis	pumps #13–#14; Dretske’s information sense, via Bieri
C7	Felt homogeneity is functional invariability that training can break	moderate	pump #15, open to the reader to try; Danto on basic actions by analogy
C8	”There simply are no qualia at all”	assertion, framed as tactics	the conclusion of §6; endnote 2 calls the eliminative wording a tactical choice

Concepts

• Quining. From The Philosophical Lexicon: “To deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant.” The title is self-consciously ironic (§1).
• Intuition pump. A thought experiment built to elicit an intuition; the paper deploys fifteen and numbers them.
• Chase-type vs Sanborn-type change. A change in reactive standards vs a change in perceptual machinery, as the two poles of any intrapersonal experiential shift (pump #7).
• Autopsychologist. What Chase and Sanborn are once their claims are testable: theorists of their own nervous systems, not introspectors with privileged access (§4).
• M-detector. A detector of a property that can be named only as “the property this detects”, like a torn Jello-box edge for its mate (pump #14).
• Pips. Bieri’s “phenomenal information properties”: the natural meaning an internal perceptual event type carries (§6).

Connections

• Block, “Troubles with Functionalism” (LIT-407, NOTE-366). Quoted twice. The jazz reply to “what are qualia?” is the presumption the paper sets out to overthrow, and “immediate phenomenological qualities” is quoted as an example of the fourth mark. The wine-tasting machine (pump #2) is an absent-qualia case. The paper’s answer to Block is not a reply to the China brain but a denial that the property in dispute is one that anyone could detect. Endnote 1 lists Block’s “Are Absent Qualia Impossible?” (1980), Shoemaker’s reply and Conee and Davis on absent qualia as the current literature. None is held in the record.
• Chalmers, “Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia” (LIT-392). Both papers turn on a change in experience the subject cannot notice. Chalmers takes it as a reductio of absent and inverted qualia under fixed organisation. Dennett takes it as a reductio of qualia as properties separable from reactions. The comparison is mine.
• Chalmers, “Facing Up” (LIT-406, NOTE-336). Its strategy (b), “deny the phenomenon”, names Dennett among others. This is the paper that strategy points to, for qualia.
• Frankish (LIT-103, NOTE-143). Cites Dennett 1988 for the post-Cartesian paradigm. Frankish’s “access consciousness is the whole story” is stronger than anything this paper asserts: Dennett grants experience its properties and denies only the special ones.
• Nagel (LIT-096). Cited for “what it is like to be a bat” among the homely examples that tempt us toward qualia (§2).
• Damasio. Dennett quotes Damasio et al. (1980) on central achromatopsia. That clinical paper is not the Damasio work the record holds (LIT-383 to LIT-388), and the record’s Damasio readings do not discuss qualia.
• The Mind’s I. Endnote 7 says Chase and Sanborn first appeared in Dennett’s reflections on Smullyan in The Mind’s I (Hofstadter and Dennett 1981, pp. 427–428), which another reader is filing now.

Bearing on the record

• THEORY-043. The THEORY’s agreed ground is that agency survives both directions, and its dispute is over phenomenal consciousness. This paper denies that there is a further property for the dispute to be about, in the sense Block and List use. On that view the anti-nesting question is a question about capacities, and the “two ways to refuse the upward move” are refusals of something the paper says is not there. This is not support for the THEORY’s promotion: the paper offers no criterion for separating a modular mind from a nation. It does make one of the THEORY’s framings, that the dispute “narrows” to experience, a contested premise worth naming in its text. My inference; the paper says nothing about groups.
• THEORY-023 (AI consciousness). Not discussed by the paper. Pump #2, the wine-tasting machine, is its only machine, and Dennett’s point is that the intuition it pumps is the target, not evidence.
• No new THEORY. A THEORY that “the absent-qualia intuition has no subject-accessible content” would need the record to hold the replies (Shoemaker 1981, Block 1980), which it does not.
• No ML instruction. Nothing here belongs in the anthology.

Limitations

• Intuition pumps. Each case is stipulated, not built. Pump #6 needs the two surgeries to produce identical introspective effects, which a defender of qualia can deny.
• Strawman risk. Dennett anticipates the charge (§2) and argues against Shoemaker’s milder definition, but only by asking what “phenomenal” means. Later phenomenal realists use definitions by example (as Schwitzgebel does in LIT-191, read in NOTE-104) that the paper does not address.
• Clinical cases. Short quoted excerpts; the paper does not analyse them beyond showing that the qualia vocabulary yields competing descriptions.
• Endnote 2 softens the conclusion. Elimination and reduction are said to differ in tactics, not doctrine. Read with it, C8 is a recommendation about vocabulary.

Open questions

• Can the indistinguishability stipulation of pump #6 be shown or refuted for a real system, say by a model in which “early” and “memory-comparison” stages are both specified? The paper treats it as obvious.
• Is Bieri’s pip notion a candidate for what the absent-qualia debate should have been about? The paper half-endorses it and drops it.
• Does the argument extend to experience in general, or only to qualia as the four marks define them? The paper says only the latter (§1); later illusionism says more.

Corrections

• none to a seeded skim (there was no seed)
• Book title. The author’s own web header reads “Consciousness in Modern Science”. The book is Consciousness in Contemporary Science (Crossref, Open Library). The brief had it right.
• Date and DOI. The book appeared from Clarendon Press in 1988 (ISBN 0198521685). The DOI 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198522379.003.0003, which Crossref dates 1992-03-12, is the paperback edition’s (ISBN 0198522371).
• Pages. Crossref gives pp. 42–77; one secondary reference list (the University of Birmingham repository copy of “Consciousness interpreted: an interpretation of Dennett’s view of consciousness”, DOI prefix 10.1080/09515089.2024) gives 43–77. Not checked against print.