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?
SelfAwarePatterns 
c’mon … in for a penny, in for a pound … computational functionalist. 🙂
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As in, let the qualia eat cake? Or computational functionalism all the way?
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You’re right to emphasize that strong illusionists deny the reality of “qualia” as supposed objects of private experience in some Cartesian theatre. You’re also right to remind us that we need to clarify exactly what is being denied. For some reason, the justifiable critique of qualia is quickly conflated with a critique of “phenomenal consciousness,” as if the only possible understanding of phenomenal consciousness were in terms of qualia.
I often see discussions of Dennett or Frankish that claim they deny experiences of “what it’s like” altogether, as if there were nothing that it’s like to be a bat, or a human; as if the “what it’s like” is the illusion. This is certainly not Frankish’s opinion, and I don’t think it was Dennett’s either. In an interview published as “Illusionism and its Place in Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (available online as a PDF), Frankish says, “We certainly have conscious experiences — episodes of attentively seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling pain or pleasure, and so on. Our lives are full of them. These episodes make a powerful impact on us, psychologically and behaviourally, and we find it natural to talk about what they are like, how they feel. Illusionists deny none of this. What they deny is a certain theory of what conscious experiences are — the theory that says they involve direct awareness of private mental qualities.”
To my mind, Frankish has just allowed for “phenomenal consciousness” in the scientifically neutral sense of phenomenology — the continental tradition that wants to talk about experience, but is far from committed to any technical theories about “qualia” underlying them. The phenomenological explanation of experience, often in terms of our entangled relationship with “Being” or “presence” or just other things, is as far as anyone else’s from endorsing a Cartesian theatre where our consciousness supposedly sits with its popcorn, privately observing something called “qualia.” Yet in this quote, Frankish immediately goes on to deny “phenomenal consciousness,” as if it were identical to mental qualities of which we have direct awareness:
“Similarly, illusionists don’t deny the existence of consciousness in the everyday sense; they only deny the existence of what philosophers call ‘phenomenal consciousness’ — the sort that is supposed to consist of mental qualities.”
I don’t know what analytical philosophers think “phenomenal consciousness” means. Maybe they assume it implies “phenomena,” little objects that are qualia by another name. But it’s far from true that all philosophers think phenomenal consciousness consists of “mental qualities.” That’s a representationalist way of thinking, and representationalism has been under heavy attack from all sides for some time. Phenomenal consciousness is surely some kind of interaction with otherness. But the internal mediations of “sensation” introduced by Locke, and the entire Western tradition it engenders, has been opened up to sharp questioning not only by the Wittgensteinian line of enquiry pursued by Dennett and Rorty, but also by idealist and phenomenalist traditions of which the analytics remain stubbornly unaware — perhaps because these approaches are not amenable to an analysis that expects an atomist world of “objects” available for scientific study in the usual way.
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Right. That’s the issue. My impression from extensive reading of Frankish is that he equates phenomenal properties with qualia, and phenomenal consciousness would be composed of phenomenal properties. So the logic is to deny qualia is to deny phenomenal properties which means denying phenomenal consciousness.
But as you note, not everyone agrees with those identities. Every step I laid out above is contested by someone. For example, from the SEP article on consciousness:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#StaCon
Although it’s possible Frankish is onboard with this distinction and means to deny the broader concept.
I have to admit I was confused myself about what exactly he denied, until he replied to me one day on Twitter when I said I was a functionalist. He said functionalism and illusionism are the same thing, which mirrors Dennett’s comment in his QQ paper. Frankish has just decided it’s worth the provocation to make his point.
It seems a hard path to follow.
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Aren’t all arguments, for or against, at their root, fundamentally elimination targeting? To argue for one is to negate the other, to some degree at least, no?
More and more I return to the notion that all experience, all mentions of qualia or perception must be sourced in biologically encoded data storage. There is simply no way around this fact.
How big is an apple? Data loaded from neural storage into contextual memory, given you have this data, provides both the qualities and qualia of the referenced item. No data — no memories, no qualities, no qualia.
Am I eliminating vast swaths of alternative explanation with this position? No doubt.
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I think that’s right. All information excludes possibilities. But I think it’s a matter of emphasis. If I say it’s all functionality, that implicitly excludes non-functional aspects (whatever that might mean). But depending on your definition of qualia and phenomenal consciousness, that might be fine.
OTOH, if I say, qualia and phenomenal consciousness don’t exist, and aren’t careful to stipulate which versions of those notions I’m referring to? Well, I’ll get people’s attention for sure, but it seems to invite confusion, and unnecessary acrimony.
Confusion is probably inevitable. But as a communication strategy, it probably helps not to take on more than we have to.
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It seem to me that the eliminative stance could be productive, that is if it were accompanied by a tight reduction of what’s meant by this. The enormous controversy and speculation here suggests that advocates have proposed nothing of the sort so far. And indeed, in the past I’ve often wondered if all this confusion has actually served their interests? Sometimes confusion can aid one’s career, and especially in philosophy.
Regardless it seems to me that eliminativism can be reduced to something that’s quite simple and effective. It’s that brain creates mind entirely by means of worldly causal dynamics. Thus whenever terms are used that suggest phenomenal magic, like ineffable, intrinsic, private, and infallible, eliminativists deny such existence. My own naturalism mandates that I am an eliminativist in this sense. You too Mike, and even though we disagree in one way regarding what’s required for brain to causally create mind — I believe that brain code requires a causally appropriate decoder for consciousness to result (probably in the form of an electromagnetic field), while you believe that consciousness can result without such a decoder.
Furthermore I’ve been threatening to write a post about how standard science should be founded upon the premise that systemic causality never fails. If science were to go this way, then eliminativism would be baked right into all standard scientific theories of consciousness. Conversely theories that violate this premise would instead be explored under a “causal plus” version of science.
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