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Topic: Mind
See here for some of Dennett's arguments against qualia. He holds a pretty unique position in that he claims there are no "raw feels" as such, no basic, ineffible apprehensions. He argues by manipulating some of the well-known thought experiments to demonstrate that they don't really work. He then introduces some of his own, to convince us that talk about qualia is inconsistent and confused. Thought experiments according to him leave something to be desired because they don't open the door to the obvious conclusion we're suppose to draw. For instance, in the neurosurgical prank, a scientist re-wires your brain to invert your color spectrum. So you wake up, and apples look blue (or something).1 According to Dennett, the qualia shift would justify us to conclude qualia neurons have been tampered with, hence supporting their existence. But he argues that the optic nerve (qualia) could be to blame or the memory centers (not qualia) for the 'perceived' mixup, since there's no way to decisively tell, such a scenerio loses its force because our "immediat apprehension" doesn't decide. He also gives an example of two coffee testers who grow tired of coffee, one whose "tastes have changed" (matured preferences) and another whose "sense of taste" has changed (qualia input centers). How to decide which? Again, the difference can either be with the input, "raw feel" or qualia, or within the memory centers. His scenarios all turn on this same possible undecidability. Another example inverts taste so sweet is salty and salty sweet. If the subject compensates, have the qualia themselves changed or have the memories? It seems like a stretch to buy into the plausibility of such a scenario but there might be something to it.
I remember when I lost my old glasses, and got new ones - with the little lenses as opposed to the big ones - the whole world seemed crazy. I almost felt like I was going to pass out, the optometrist looked like a flat cartoon, the world seemed like it was very, very small. In fact, for weeks afterwords, I miscalculated food portions. I kept thinking I was getting less than I really was. But now, everything seems exactly the same with or without my glasses save the clarity. So if I'm understanding Dennett I have to ask, did my eyes in their ability to directly instill a "raw feel" adjust or did some other facet of my brain kick in to "figure it out" (as my optometrist said would happen) and make me think that the new world I was seeing is the same as the old one? It doesn't matter what the answer is, the point is that my apprehension of the supposed "qualia" is useless in deciding. And that goes against the thought experiments which attempt to show the immediate apprehension making all the difference - telling us something we couldn't have known otherwise. It seems to me, the structure of the argument is along the same lines of other philosophical investigations which cast doubt on the primacy of "facts" as independent of "interpretation" or "evidence" having a primacy above "theory." I'm not saying I completely buy into Dennett here, but I have to say given my leanings towards confirmation holism and the like that it's difficult to dismiss.
1 I was thrown off here because I think the Wikipedia entry on Qualia is wrong in their explanation. They say regarding the 'prank', "it follows that we are imagining a change in a property which determines the way things look to us, but which has no physical basis." Yet Dennett says regarding the same, "and we later discover, if you like, just how the evil neurophysiologists tampered with your neurons to accomplish this." So how can the prank have no physical basis if neurons are being tampered with - why in fact call it the "neurosurgical prank?" I think the SEP entry on qualia answers this. Color inversion arguments have been apparently offered with varying strength, and lining up Dennett's quote, "It seems to us that the standard verificationist.." with the SEP quotation of the same it would follow from SEP that Block and Fodor were arguing aginst functionalism, not physicalism with the "prank" even though a color inversion argument could (impractically) be made against physicalism. Maybe I'll try to edit it and see what happens. heh.
