Is the eliminative stance productive?

A number of recent conversations, some I’ve been in, and others witnessed, left me thinking about eliminative views like the strong illusionism of Keith Frankish and Daniel Dennett. This is the view that access consciousness, the availability of information for verbal report, reasoning, and behavior, exists. But phenomenal consciousness, the qualia, the what it’s like aspect of experience, doesn’t.

The problem with this view has always been clarifying what exactly is being denied. This seems complicated by the fact that terms like “phenomenal” and “qualia” have a number of different meanings. For example, many people use “qualia” to refer to something in the vicinity of the primary and secondary qualities discussed by early modern thinkers like Galileo and John Locke.

(Primary qualities include size, shape, duration, motion, etc. These are perceived properties understood to actually be out in the world. Secondary qualities include color, sweet, bitter, hot, cold, etc. These are argued to only exist in the mind, or at least only exist because of minds.)

These types of qualities definitely exist, and serve functional roles. Imagine a yellow elephant with green polka dots. Unless you’re aphantasic, I’m betting you had no trouble picturing it, even though I doubt you’ve ever seen a yellow elephant with green polka dots. (I was careful to make sure the featured image had different colors.) But, unless you’re blind, you have seen yellow things, green things, polka dotted patterns, and elephants before. You were able to combine these characteristics, these qualities, based on your familiarity with them.

Of course, the illusionists are denying a stronger claim. David Lewis, in asking whether materialist should believe in qualia, discussed the functional aspect I described above, a version he saw as compatible with materialism. But there’s another proposition regarding qualia that he discussed: the idea that we can know their full nature solely through self reflection.

I think it’s this assumption that causes the trouble. If we can introspect the full nature of qualia, then their seeming simplicity is irreducible simplicity, which implies they exist separate from the operations of the brain, allowing space for talk of inverted qualia and the absent qualia of zombies. And since no one can detect anything like that in the brain, they must be unobservable to anyone but the subject, who has special “direct” access, resulting in the intuitions behind Mary’s room.

This is the version Daniel Dennett attacked in his 1988 paper, “Quining Qualia.” But Dennett did more than just attack the concept, he attacked the term “qualia,” a standard other illusionists have followed. It’s not enough to attack the idea. The “tangled theoretical knot” of the terms themselves must go. Or at least that’s the argument.

But this causes a problem. There is widespread confusion about what exactly is being denied. For many people, terms like “qualia”, “phenomenal properties”, or “what it’s like” refer to the functional notion, the one we use to imagine weirdly colored animals. So when they see these terms attacked, it sounds like the basic concept is being denied.

The results over the years seem to have been endless conversations with the illusionists trying to clarify exactly what they mean. And yes, not all the confusion is genuine; some people use the conceptual confusion as a rhetorical weapon. But the very fact that it is such an effective weapon speaks to the confusion for anyone not familiar with the history.

Does this mean we should try to rehabilitate “qualia” and related terms? I personally stopped using them a few years ago, specifically due to the definitional confusion. For a long time I thought I was aligned with Pete Mandik’s qualia quietism, an idea I took to mean that these terms were best avoided due to the disparate definitions out there. There’s always other ways to talk about the perception of characteristics.

But qualia quietism seems to take a stronger stance against this language than I do. I don’t use the terms, but I’m not going to scold someone who does. For better or worse, they seem to have spread beyond obscure philosophical discussions. Instead I’ll typically try to figure out which sense they’re using them in, and deal with the concept they’re discussing. That said, qualia quietism remains the neo-Dennettian view I’m closest to.

But I’ve come to think being intolerant of terms like “qualia”, “phenomenal”, “what it’s like”, and similar labels, is drawing the battle lines in the wrong place, one that seems to sow confusion and produces a message that is easy to strawman. Perceptual qualities exist, at least in a representational and relational sense. This shouldn’t be a problematic admission for a physicalist.

Dennett noted in his 1988 paper (second endnote) that the difference between a reductive physicalist and an eliminative one is tactical, a difference in communication approaches. His goal was to confront people’s intuitions and try to force a reexamination. That seems to work well with some of us, who were already predisposed to agree with this ontology. But it seems to generate summary dismissal from everyone else.

Of course, a physicalist does need to deny the idea that we have introspective access to the full nature of our experience, that we’re perceiving something other than just the tip of the iceberg. Dennett compared these tips to the icons on a computer desktop, calling them a user illusion, but the actual software term seems less judgmental: user interface; experience is the brain’s user interface to its own operations. As Lewis argues, this is still eliminative, but look at how little is being eliminated.

All of which is why I prefer to just call myself a functionalist. It emphasizes more what I think is the case, causal roles, rather than what isn’t. Of course, with developments in AI, functionalism is becoming just as much a target. But in my experience it doesn’t generate the same visceral outrage.

What do you think? Am I overlooking benefits to the eliminative approach? Or missing vulnerabilities to just emphasizing functionality? Or worrying about something that doesn’t really make that much difference?