Dennett's heterophenomenology

The issue with this post isn't that no one here is interested in consciousness. That would be a strange blind spot for people thinking about improving their own rationality, which entails knowing more about the mind.

What's wrong here, at least for me, is that this is a hatchet job. It takes only one sentence to say "I assert that consciousness is real, and h17y fails to account for it". Say that, and expand with what conclusions you arrive at from there. If you're going to critique Dennett, at least make more than a half-hearted effort to extract some insight from his books.

A worthwhile critique of Dennett's views would require a guardedly sympathetic examination of his claims. You need to internalize the claims, which means you can convincingly, in your own words, reproduce Dennett's actual reasoning, and then point out where that reasoning fails.

A worthwhile critique would use Dennett's own tools: the Tower of Generate-and-Test, which is a key ingredient in constructing "stuff that thinks" from "stuff that doesn't think"; the Intentional Stance, indispensable to find shortcuts through the vast number of reductionist layers you'd have to traverse from atoms to mind; the Multiple Drafts hypothesis, which shows how to dissolve the questions "when does this thought become conscious" or "which parts of me are conscious"; the User Illusion model of consciousness, which explains why the sense of being conscious is adaptive, and its cousin the Self as Center of Narrative Gravity.

This is what I'd like to see - a post (or if necessary a sequence) introducing these individual thinking tools, showing what work they do in Dennett's hands, where they touch on topics relevant to this community, and possibly explaining where they fall short.

but it leaves unanswered what Dennett calls the Hard Question:

I think that Chalmers was the one to start calling it that.

I think the first problem we have to solve is what the burden of proof is like for this discussion.

The far view says that science and reductionism have a very good record at demystifying lots of things that were thought to be unexplainable (fire, life, evolution), so the burden is on those saying the Hard Problem does not just follow from the Easy Problems. According to this, opponents of reductionism have to provide something close to a logical inconsistency with reducing conciseness. It would require huge amounts of evidence against reducing to overcome the prior for it coming from the far view.

The other side is that conciseness requires explaining a first-person experience. This view says that the reductionists have to demonstrate why science can make this new jump from only third-person explanations.

IMHO, I think that problems similar to the second view have been brought up against every major expansion of reductionism and science and have generally been proven wrong, so I vote that the burden of proof should be on those arguing against reductionism.

Whichever side ends up being right, it is important to first agree on what each side has to do to win or else each side can declare victory while agreeing on the facts.

I think the issue that underlies much of the gnashing of teeth and confusion that often arises around consciousness-involving discussions is that we simply don't yet have a real, technical, comprehensive theory of how our brains work. As soon there is one, the confusions around the fuzzy, hard-to-grasp concepts, like "qualia", "experience" or " consciousness" should either dissolve or transform into other concepts that describe phenomena and regularities better in the context of a technical understanding.

Right now, one obvious mistake is to have excessive doubts about the fabric of reality as it is established by science and reductionism just because some seemingly paradoxical, mysterious thing that goes on in our heads.

On the other hand, people arguing in favor of a reductionist account - this is my impression - tend to trivialize the problem that we are having philosophical debates mostly made of magical concepts and black boxes. Because the case for a reductionist ontology is so solid, it's tempting to play the game by the rules of philosophy, not technicality, and to argue our ways towards our preferred reductionist belief. As far as we don't exactly know how consciousness works, there is no guarantee that any step of reasoning involving it is not completely invalid or nonsensical; it's just building a castle from a heap of black boxes.

The Dissolving the Question technique is a pretty good example of how this should be done, and I think Eliezer provided some genuine insights in the free will sequence and in How an Algorithm Feels from Inside. But both are rather limited compared to the totality of human experience. In hindsight, the problem of free will in particular does seem relatively easy because there we don't have to work exclusively within the domain of the human mind; we're aided by "outside" musings about algorithms, causality and physics.

In short, we'd better have trust in reductionism and at the same time not make up complicated philosophical arguments until we have a grasp of what consciousness & co. are all about.

For my money, the best challenge to Dennett's position on how to understand the role of introspective accounts in psychology is Alvin Goldman's 'Science, Publicity and Consciousness' and the most stimulating work being done from a position relatively consonant with Dennett's is that being produced by Eric Schwitzgebel. If you're interested in introspection you should check out his new book 'Perplexities of Consciousness' but at the very least you should have a look at some of the papers he has on his website on the subject, especially 'Introspection, what?' which has what I believe to be the only published 'boxological diagram joke'. Dennett has responded to a number of criticisms in an article entitled 'Heterophenomenology Reconsidered' though you may need a journal subscription to access it, I don't remember if he has made it available on his site.

As regards the qualia point, obviously (?) there have been papers and papers and papers offering definition after definition of qualia, however one taxonomy which I've found useful with regards to clarifying the discussion of the connection between qualia and attitudes towards consciousness is Hugh Frankish's 'Quining Diet Qualia' which distinguishes 'Classic' 'Diet' and 'Zero' qualia (after types of Coke) with 'Zero' being the kind associated with Dennett (as well as the type Frankish is inclined to defend) and Diet being associated with materialists who nonetheless have a robust account of qualitative consciousness and the introspectibility of the same (such as Michael Tye, Ned Block and Peter Carruthers) - this would be the sort of 'materialist qualia' implicated in the notion of qualia inversion or qualitative absence (zombies), both of which Dennett claims are intuitively tempting but incoherent notions. Frankish' taxonomy is useful for linking the issue of qualia back to introspection and clarifying in your own mind how what might seem like separate strands of Dennett's thought tie together and contrast with other leading contemporary philosophers of mind.

The heterophenomenological program is to hit Ignore on that experience.

What do we call it when people experience the qualia 'Irk' upon more exposure to the same old 'qualia' stuff rehashed and hit 'Vote down' then Ignore it? It seems to be working for them.