Relation to the world· Mind and consciousness
Illusionism
Axis: The enigma of consciousness — Is lived experience something more than the structure and functioning of the brain?
The qualitative feel we think we grasp by introspection is an illusion the brain has about itself. What is denied is not our experiences, but qualia as ordinarily conceived, private and ineffable properties: what remains to be explained is not those properties, but why they seem so obvious to us.
Philosophers 1
Dennettexplicit
Dennett rejects as the tradition conceives them: intrinsic, ineffable, private and infallible properties, given to introspection. What exists are brain states and the real patterns to which our reports attach; introspection is not a gaze upon an inner stage but a source of reports, often confabulated, which his method, heterophenomenology, treats as data to be explained rather than as established facts. Consciousness is therefore not denied: it is the appearance of an inner glow that itself becomes the effect to be explained.
"Quining Qualia" (1988) · Consciousness Explained (1991)
Argument
- Everything we know of , those private, immediate, ineffable properties, comes from a single source, introspection: the way the brain presents its own states to itself. No outside observation attests to them.
- But that mechanism is a mechanism like any other, and we know it errs: the richness of the visual field is largely reconstructed, we confabulate after the fact the reasons for our choices, we fail to detect huge changes before our eyes. It is not a mirror, it is a summary cut out for acting fast.
- A mechanism that simplifies and errs elsewhere may also err about what it is itself: nothing compels us to treat its verdicts as infallible data, except their force of conviction, which is precisely what needs explaining.
- One question then remains, and this one is tractable: why does the brain represent its states as having ineffable properties? Answering it would account for everything there is to explain, our reports, our astonishment, even our debates, with no remainder.
Therefore So qualia are not to be explained but dissolved: what exists is a brain representing itself as having ineffable experience; what needs explaining is that representation, not its supposed object.
See the pageObjectionAttacks the position
- An illusion is what seems otherwise than it is: the stick seems broken in water, it is not. The concept therefore always presupposes two terms, a seeming and a being, and the gap between them.
- But in the case of experience, the seeming is precisely what is at issue: that pain seems painful to me already is the pain. There is no room for a gap between suffering and its seeming to be suffering.
- To say that the brain itself as having an experience it does not have is thus to describe a state in which something is present to someone: precisely what was to be eliminated.
- Everything else can be granted: that introspection deceives us about the richness of the visual field, about our motives, about the nature of our states. Those errors bear on the description of experience, and they presuppose that there is something to describe badly.
Therefore Illusionism can correct the idea we form of experience; it cannot cancel it, for the illusion it invokes is already a form of it.
See the page- Descriptive Thought experimentWhat it is like
There is something it is like to be me, and nothing of the sort, presumably, for a stone. But is that "something" one more reality in the world, which physical description lets slip, or only a limit of ours, unable as we are to occupy another's point of view?
a being's point of view - Descriptive Thought experimentMary's room
A scientist knows everything physics can say about colour, without ever having seen any: the day she sees red, does she learn something? If she does, lived experience would be one more fact, which objective knowledge did not contain; if not, one must say what she gains while learning nothing.
a lived experience - DescriptiveThe philosophical zombie
Imagine a double physically identical to you, acting and speaking as you do, but feeling nothing: no one home inside. If such a double is even conceivable, matter does not suffice to fix experience; but does what we can imagine prove anything about what is possible?
a double without experience - DescriptiveIs my mind transparent to me?
I believe I know better than anyone what I think and feel. But the mind may exceed what it perceives of itself: what if introspection told, after the fact, a story about a mental life that largely escapes it?
one's own mental life - DescriptiveBeing wrong about what one feels
I can be wrong about the world, and even about my own motives, but about my very pain? It seems the one point where seeming and being coincide. What if that very obviousness were the best-installed illusion of all, a brain representing to itself an inner life as it believes it to be?
one's own experience - DescriptiveMinds other than my own
I never perceive another's experience, only bodies behaving: how do I know there is someone behind them? The only consciousness I have direct testimony of is my own.
access to another's experience - DescriptiveWhat holds experience together
At every moment I see, hear and think at once, yet all of it comes to me as a single experience. What holds it together? When the bridge between the two hemispheres is severed, one and the same brain seems to host two streams of experience that ignore each other.
the unity of the field of consciousness