Topic: Mind
One of the things about Dennett is that he insists his theory is just a sketch. That might be important to remember because, where there seems to be unresolved issues that needs answers, perhaps he's just offering any more details leaving his words open to reading things in he didn't intend. I've jumped around in the second half of "..explained.." still looking for an explicit denial of what I'd call "minimal qualia" or, "the phenomena is in the mistake". Obviously, he denies "redness" and so on. But as Searle insists (and it's an obvious concern I'm sure many have), what is the mistake of thinking one is perceiving red? Can computers for instance, mistakenly think they are perceiving something red? Again, trashcaning the formal project of phenomenology, of a science that rigidly grounds objective perception, is far easier to accept than denying that two seconds ago I at least SEEMED to feel a pain in my arm. That's the point Searl attacks Dennett on, the obvious point to attack him on, but I don't see where he explictly makes this case. In favor of this case, from his words, the most important part of the book is in the first couple chapters where he's making the case that there's no central place in the mind where it all comes together in a unified stream. If this is true, then there is no single place for "redness" to come together, or even the "seeming" of redness to come together. BUT, he frequently uses the language, "it only seems that way" when talking about colors and sensations. How does it "seem that way?" If there is a single narrative track at the top of the heap, can something "seem that way" to "it" even if we'd deny that there is "anything it is like to be" a person - who is at best the "center of gravity" of numerable narratives?
I haven't said anything new there, just yet another summary of what I've said a few times now. To add a few brush strokes to Dennett's incomplete picture, we have to talk about what consciousness is to Dennett - the positive case. There is in animals and computers the ability to calculate, to take inputs from the environment, process them, and respond. But this isn't consciousness. It might be thinking. But consciousness is "second order" thinking. Or, thinking about thinking. When you're driving, your brain is doing all kinds of calculations, taking in all kinds of visual information which isn't part of that narrow "stream" we like to think of as our conscious experience. And that would-be stream also just happens to be the supposed "what it is to be like" of other philospers. Qulia is then a subset (or perhaps the entirety) of this "what it is to be like." So that means, the positive case for what the "mistake" of qualia is, will be encompased by second order thinking. If we understand second order thinking, we'll understand the mistake we call qualia.
Now Dennett doesn't have a clear answer for what second order thinking is, but he's got a research project for trying to understand it. We can get almost to the end of Dennett's thesis by his considerations of blindsight. I've talked about that before as perhaps the archtypical case for phenomenal consciousness. A person with damage to visual centers in the brain for a certain sweep of visual input can't "see" anything but can report with surprising accuracy simple stimula present in that field. Dennett's star subject is a guy who can track the motion of a fast pinlight and mimick its path by hand gestures. When asked if he's conscious of the motion, he replies (something like), "of course I am, how else could I show you what it's doing?" So Dennett argues this special case of blindsight is different than the general case, and the difference turns on this second order awareness, which becomes the crude link between thinking and the "mistake" of qualia.
The last thing I'll probably have to report about this book is the section where he talks about the difference between this special case of blindsight and normal vision. This blindsight example is the foot in the door, but there has to be a fuller version to account for the most clear examples of would-be quale that we think we perceive. And I think at that point, there won't be much else to go on in reconciling "minimal qualia" with computation.
p.s.
I realize that last sentence could be misconstrued as reductionist which isn't Dennett's goal, he wants to eliminate qualia altogether. But there has to be some way of maping the discussion in the language on both sides of the fence and that's what I'm trying to do. When Ammon stood before King Lamoni, he inquired,
"believest thou in a Great Spirit?"
"yay."
"This Great Spirit is God!"
Even though Ammon believed God is a super powerful extraterrestrial, not a great spirit, he had to find a way to couch his thesis in the language of his audience. So even if we want to be eliminative towards "Great Spirit" or "Qualia", I think the language can be taken with a grain of salt for instructional purposes.
