Daniel Dennett
He turns his opponents' argument around: it is not science that misses lived experience, it is introspection that is wrong about itself; the obviousness of the inner life is not the evidence to be respected, but the phenomenon to be explained.
American · 1942 – 2024
American philosopher, a materialist and Darwinian, who holds qualitative experience, as introspection believes it grasps it, to be an illusion the brain makes about itself: what he denies is not our experiences, but qualia conceived as private and ineffable properties. He also defends a compatibilism about freedom.
Justification
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.
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.Consciousness Explained (1991), ch. 1, opening sentence
"Quining Qualia" (1988) · Consciousness Explained (1991)
Justification
For Dennett, understanding is not an inner flash added to information processing: it is what a system does whose behaviour shows regularities fine enough that one gains by ascribing mental states to it, what he calls the intentional stance. Against the , he replies that the man with the rulebook is only a cog: it is not he who would understand Chinese, but the whole system, room, rules and ledgers included. To seek in the brain a place where understanding would finally occur would be to reinstate the Cartesian theatre his work is spent dismantling.
The Intentional Stance (1987) · Consciousness Explained (1991)
Justification
Dennett defends explanation by parts while refusing its caricature. He coins the phrase greedy reductionism for the haste to skip intermediate levels, to explain mind by neurons without passing through the processing mechanisms that do the work. Good reductionism keeps the storeys: it shows how, degree by degree, processes devoid of intelligence end up producing competence, without ever adding anything to matter.
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995)