Topic: Mind
Trying to keep pace on breadth, I'm about 100 pages into Dennett's "Consciousness Explained." I'm not big into long books and Dennett just drags on - his online essays are much better for me. He spends a lot of time talking about how our intuitions are often wrong, perhaps more wrong than right. Following his friend Richard Rorty, he wants to destabalize "indubitibility", specifically by showing how scientific third person accounts cast doubt on first person reports. The question though of course, and one I still have after reading his essays online, is how far he intends to take this. If qualia become meaningless, does that mean we really don't feel anything? There is a huge gap between a scientific phenomenology project like Husserl's and feeling anything - absolutely anything. A parallel problem people might be more familiar with is found in epistemology. No one has succeeded at solving to problem of knowledge. No one has succeeded at defining what science is. But does that mean there is no such thing as knowledge, do we become radical skeptics? Most people who reject the project of modern philosophy still believe they know things or believe that science works differently than religion. Is it any surprise that a formal phenomenology would also fail in a similar way to epistemology? And if it does, do we become radical phenomo-skeptics who quit believing we "feel pain"? More to the point, is that what Dennett is asking us to do?
This is important, because Searle, for instance, rejects Dennett by asking us to pinch ourselves and then demand, "now say there is no such thing as qualia!" Searle insists on what I'd call minimal qualia, that the phenomena is in the mistake. But there is a huge difference between that minimal thesis and phenomenology. There is certainly no guarantee either that if the minimal thesis is true, that phenomenology is possible. So by buying something akin to Meditation two it doesn't necessarily follow we can get to three, four and five. So the question is, does Searle (and others) create a strawman or is this really what Dennet thinks? Dennett hasn't tackled this issue head on from what I can tell.
