Double post because of the notification bug, and I think this is an important clarifying point in my dispute with @Kenosha Kid.

(Generally the idea that the brain is doing stuff that the mind is unaware of does not sit favourably, but that's just the way it is.) — Kenosha Kid

Yes! I'm coming at this from the "left wing" angle that how you've characterised qualia is still subject to the article's critiques. It's extremely hard to stop thinking in terms of perceptual intermediaries with private properties.

I quoted these from Merleau-Ponty earlier in the thread, who is critical of qualia for broadly similar reasons:

The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’. A really homogeneous area offering nothing to be cannot be given to any perception. The structure of actual perception alone can teach us what perception is. The pure impression is, therefore, not only undiscoverable, but also imperceptible and so inconceivable as an instant of perception.

The "terminal point" (the last phase in your diagram) being a "pure impression" given to "perception", the "pure impression" allegedly has experiential properties, but is "inconceivable as an instant of perception". Perception being of sense data with qualia is the same idea as consciousness being of perceptual objects with experienced properties.

Pure sensation will be the experience of an undifferentiated, instantaneous, dotlike impact. It is unnecessary to show, since authors are agreed on it, that this notion corresponds to nothing in our experience, and that the most rudimentary factual perceptions that we are acquainted with, in creatures such as the ape or the hen, have a bearing on relationships and not on any absolute terms

Compare that to "extrinsic relational properties" in Dennett's essay. "absolute terms" I'm reading as criticising the same idea that "red" inheres in the experiential object as a quale, rather than red being a property of my relationship with a seen object. I see x as red vs my experiential object has a red quale.

he alleged self-evidence of sensation is not based on any testimony of consciousness, but on widely held prejudice. We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or which emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we immediately take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither.

The "final stage" in which a completed perceptual object is transmitted "to" the conscious apprehension (or is not transmitted to it) is a transposition of what is perceived into a perceptual object - what is seen to seen properties of formatted objects that we have seen - rather than an instance of our relationship with our environment. "what is it like to me" - red, "what is it like", "what is my sensory object like? I guess it's like what I've sensed...".

MP is saying that it's a mistake to imagine that a quale can be drawn into awareness in isolation, particularly from ideas about what's real and what things are, but even from the rest of the experiential symphony. Likewise temperature can't be considered in isolation from volume and pressure.

Existentialists have long pointed out that experience seems to have no beginning or ending, and defies complete capture by a simple narrative (Kierkegaard), thus centuries of painting, sculpture, music, dance, literature, poetry, architecture, religion, and mysticism.

If denying the lone quale is our goal, then we won... against whoever its champion was.

It's like characterising perception as a packaging process for sensory data, and then some other distinct process passes the package as a whole to the "conscious apprehension". — fdrake

I'm struggling to see how that is suggested by the above diagram.

The packaging/formatting occurs within the process of perception as a continually evolving model of data input streams and compensatory/exploratory activities — fdrake

Which is present in the image but entirely absent in the second flow discussed here, which shows raw sensory data presented to our consciousnesses, as if how we see things is how they are read by our senses. This, at least, we know is wrong.

"conscious apprehension" is some feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment — fdrake

Conscious apprehension, as meant by me at least, is nothing more than the subset of information about my environment (including my body) that I am presently conscious of, as opposed to that which I am not conscious of. Since we are at least conscious of them, I think it helps to bear in mind that, whatever else is going on, and whatever definitions of consciousness we prefer, this presentation is happening. The alternative is, as per that shorter flow, that our bodies just dump raw sensory data straight into our consciousnesses unadulterated, which we know for a fact it does not do. I never see, for instance, the upside-down image on my retina, or the rapid changes in view that my brain nicely stabilises for me, or the light correction to make the ambient light appear whiter.

So if your envisioned "feedback relationship of those data streams and the structure of our environment" can account for that, groovy.

Try this phrasing: how something is apprehended ("what is it like to me" if conscious) is part of the perceptual process, rather than resulting in a distinct terminal point of a data stream that apprehends a completed experiential object of some kind (that bears "experiential properties"/qualia as they are usually used). — fdrake

But this was Isaac's point and was already accounted for. The fact that what I am conscious of changes, is corrected, augmented, etc. was included in the rough, simplistic diagram I put up and described in the succeeding text. The fact that consciousness is not a terminal is illustrated by the fact that the brain sometimes withholds processed sensory data from conscious appraisal.

Compare that to "extrinsic relational properties" in Dennett's essay. "absolute terms" I'm reading as criticising the same idea that "red" inheres in the experiential object as a quale, rather than red being a property of my relationship with a seen object. I see x as red vs my experiential object has a red quale. — fdrake

But I'm not arguing that some disembodied red is a quale. If it's not an object of my perception, it does not qualify. The redness of a car is not a disembodied redness.

"what is it like to me" - red, "what is it like", "what is my sensory object like? I guess it's like what I've sensed...". — fdrake

Yes. Why not? I'm not trying to shoehorn objects of perception into some previous mysterious philosophy of qualia. I'm just saying that we have them and they serve a purpose. That purpose is not necessarily to do philosophy with or chat about them ;)

The reason why we have a philosophical idea of qualia is because "conscious experience has properties" and "each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do" and "whenever someone experiences something as being one way rather than another, this is true in virtue of some property of something happening in them at the time". Then some tradition of philosophy happens and those causes of that philosophy end up "so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia".

Dennett's quarry is of traditional philosophical, religious, and other cultural descriptions of properties of consciousness which, through ignorance, end up being nothing like the truth. Since qualia is a philosophical term, it is associated with those cultural defecations. So if there are no "ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate" qualia, fine. But we still, as Dennett says, have properties of consciousness, which is what is actually being identified as qualia even if the properties of qualia have been erroneously ascribed, i.e. the prior guesswork at the properties of those qualia is bad.

Translation of talk about nothing into talk about something often takes some trouble...
— Nelson Goodman: Sights Unseen

Indeed. Especially when the writer keeps casually and carelessly using concepts that he also contends are meaningless. This can only lead to confusion. — Olivier5

Carelessness makes trouble, but scrupulous analysis takes it.

Let me rephrase, there is a big difference between saying that a person has a sense datum/experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy) and saying that the same person has had a unique (idiosyncratic) experience. The former commits one to the existence of entities of a given sort with the property of privacy that stand in some relationship to experience, the latter only commits one to have been the perceiving agent in a perceptual event or perceptual relationship. — fdrake

With regard to the intuition pump of inverted spectra:

The original version of intuition pump #3: the inverted spectrum (Locke, 1690: II, xxxii, 15) is a speculation about two people: how do I know that you and I see the same subjective color when we look at something? Since we both learned color words by being shown public colored objects, our verbal behavior will match even if we experience entirely different subjective colors.

Assuming it is possible for two people to have different experiences of “subjective colour”, would this be a case (for each of them) of an “experiential entity with a given structure that only they have any access to of any sort (privacy)” or would it be a case of a “unique (idiosyncratic) experience”?

If denying the lone quale is our goal, then we won... against whoever its champion was. — frank

Right on. Quining Qualia is one big straw man.

scrupulous analysis — bongo fury

I'm waiting.

If I may summarise, then, the conscious perception of my field may include something caused by a car without the car 'tag' (recognition of car object with or without dorsal data), then moments later updated with that tag. So I consciously see the light caused by the car before I see the car. — Kenosha Kid

Yep, that's about it.

to clarify, it's not a conscious decision to identify a car, right? Whenever the car recognition output is presented for conscious consideration, it's not doing so because I'm studying a patch of light and trying to figure out what it is. This is all going on in the background. — Kenosha Kid

I see what you're getting at, and generally, yes, but I'm going to be careful unless I get called out on it later - we need to take care when talking about conscious awarenes. It's not a binomial thing, you are more or less aware of signals depending on your level of attention which varies. Here, I think, is an important issue which might touch on some of the stuff you're trying to work out with regards to the 'presentation' of the image as you put it. The 'identification of 'car' (to the extent that it happens that way - remember it's just one model with a very small sample size study to back it up) happens subconsciously. What you're typically aware of depends on what you need that identification for - Are you about to say the word that goes with the object, are you choosing the right object from others, are about to interact with it...Whichever following action requires you to identify it as a 'car' will determine how the fact of that identification reaches your awareness, if it does at all.

Am I right in saying that, as you describe it, data from our conscious perception is fed back into these myriad cascades and may affect (or indeed effect) some of these unconscious processes — Kenosha Kid

Yes, cortices have backward acting neural connections whose job it is to suppress non-matching signals and they're often (but not exclusively) informed by the consequences of conscious recognition. A classic example is sensory priming where you are exposed to a distorted sound/picture/smell, you're then exposed to the undistorted version (which you interpret the meaning of at least partly consciously), then when you next are exposed to the distorted version it seems much clearer. Your higher models of what might be being said are suppressing the signals from your primary sensory areas which have all the 'noise' based on your conscious awareness of what the similar experience just resulted in.

All this is then adjusted post hoc to make a coherent story.

Do these processes rely on this, or can we recognise objects just based on pre-processed data? This is again going back to the idea of sensory data categorised as unimportant, such as the sound of a car engine on a busy Manhattan block. — Kenosha Kid

I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. I'm going to take a stab at it assuming you mean to ask if conscious awareness is a necessary feature of bacwkard acting signals. No, but it is usually involved at the higher model levels which, of course, will have an influence over all the models below them. Dream study is probably the best case study for this (again huge pinch of salt required here, very difficult to study), but it seems likely, because of the way memory storage works, that basic object recognition, including limited function, must be able to take place without conscious awareness because they do so during deep sleep dreaming, but appropriate response, form detail and complex function do require some conscious awareness because they only seem to enter stage during REM sleep where you're semi-conscious.

What I meant about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater is that there still remain objects of subjective experience, such that I can see a car without consciously determining it to be a car (even if 1 ms ago I didn't see a car), and that this object is private (internal processing from my raw sensory input to instantaneous apprehension by me) and immediate (I see car as car object is presented to me, which may be some while after I see light from car), but not intrinsic or ineffable, and that these objects and the processes that yield them (e.g. neuron that recognises car) underlie our pre-theoretical conceptions of what theorists call qualia. — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, I think I agree with you there - but as I think @fdrake is getting at (though I've only skimmed the other responses - not much time this morning, sorry) that there could meaningfully be identified an object of conscious experience leaves absolutely nothing for Qualists. I don't want to be pedantic, just to clarify my position, but I don't think it would be be a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that Qualia are completely useless and have no place in studies of perception. The objects of perception to which qulaists would like to attach subjective properties, I think are not in danger should we reject qualia wholesale. That said, if we want to reserve the possibility of studying, say, the taste of coffee, We do need some fuzzy-edged set of responses we might associate most with it. I'm not opposed to that kind of grouping. Maybe these could be the new 'qualia', but I think, given the sullied history of the term, we'd better reach for something else.

Right on. Quining Qualia is one big straw man — Olivier5

Maybe in the way we've been interpreting it. To get his points, I think we would need to start with an externalist outlook, so recognizing meaning as something established in human interactions. Dennett wants to do to qualia what Quine did to reference: conclude that due to inscrutability, we can dismiss it. Something like that.

Note the question Banno has asked: why do we need to talk about qualia? I would say its mainly because of ethical considerations. I guess Banno has gotten busy, though.

Consciousness is just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity and it's caused by the neurons which produce language, movement and other awareness-mediated responses being stimulated by the neurons constituting the processing of sensory inputs to which that awareness relates. — Isaac


As the subject, this is my tendency to be capable of reporting -- but not just on any mental activity, on my mental activity. I'm wondering if there are pre-utterance steps where some subsystem perhaps tags the analysis and speech prep being done as "me related", or if there aren't, and why we need or don't need such steps. — Srap Tasmaner

Self-identity is a whole other massive topic, although it's related here, but like saying "I wonder what's in that wardrobe, Edmund". Broadly the idea of a me/other divide is important at a somatosensory level in the assessment of sensory inputs (that's my hand waiving about out there), but not at the reporting level (we can really easily insert ourselves into false memories, have out of body experiences, experience the emotions of others) here tagging stuff as me-related doesn't seem nearly so 'sticky' and is almost certain done post hoc (when we try to analyse past responses from memory). Where it's important again is in somatic responses, we need to know I moved my arm. Somatoparaphrenia is the condition studied to give insight here (where people think part of their body does not belong to them) and Alien Hand Syndrome (where people seem to assign the movements of their limbs to another identity). These seem at first glance to be perhaps similar, but the differences are revealing (I know I keep banging this drum, but these things do get misrepresented so I'm going to say it gain - very small sample size, very large pinch of salt). The former condition seems to be the result of deeper neural processing of sensory inputs not being sent on to neocortical areas - ie we don't get to assess the 'meaning' of the signals. This could be taken as evidence that the identification of 'self' takes place at higher levels than the basic somatosensory system. The latter, however - more on topic here- seems related to occipital cortex damage as simple as -"It doesn't look like my arm, so maybe it isn't may arm".

Interestingly (to me anyway), and this relates to what I was talking to @Kenosha Kid about, patients with somatoparaphrenia and Alien Hand will come up with and have deep beliefs about, all sorts of plausible real-world stories to explain their situation. It's something very common in most anosognosias, they're accompanied by an absolute conviction in the story explaining it. We need, it seems, some coherent story at a very high level (meaning it combines lots of input data) which explains the sum total of our sensory inputs.

I only skimmed instead of rereading, but it seems to me Dennett might have added here that I am generally expected to know non-inferentially, and perhaps infallibly, whose qualia are rattling around in my consciousness, and to know that they are mine rather than yours. — Srap Tasmaner

As with the allocation of responses to objects, I think any allocation of ownership to responses would be mixed, and mostly post hoc (with the possible exception of immediate bodily responses - like catching a a ball) so yeah, Dennet could well have added that to the list of things to be thrown out.

That's an incomplete definition of consciousness. Reporting on mental activity isn't even a necessary condition for consciousness, let alone a sufficient one. — RogueAI

What measure of consciousness are you using then?

Dennett wants to do to qualia what Quine did to reference: conclude that due to inscrutability, we can dismiss it. — frank

As I am wont of pointing out, the obvious problem with that is that Quine was mindlessly referencing some kind of stuff when he said that, by using the words "reference" or "dismiss" or "inscrutable"... :roll:

And this is what passes for philosophy in analytic quarters: utter conceptual confusion.

why do we need to talk about qualia? — frank

We use the concept of qualia like we use any concept: instrumentally, opportunistically. People who don't want to use it are welcome not to, and people who want to use it are expected to be able to define it, somewhat. But to try and dismiss or erase a concept is just ridiculous. Philosophy has nothing to do with shooting down concepts. That's a waste of time.

:up:

What you're typically aware of depends on what you need that identification for - Are you about to say the word that goes with the object, are you choosing the right object from others, are about to interact with it...Whichever following action requires you to identify it as a 'car' will determine how the fact of that identification reaches your awareness, if it does at all. — Isaac

Thanks again, Isaac. What action best describes scrolling down this page and coming across the picture of the two cars and identifying them as cars? I suppose, in a page of mostly text, an image is surprising and, when we become conscious of something surprising, the instinct is to identify it?

A classic example is sensory priming where you are exposed to a distorted sound/picture/smell, you're then exposed to the undistorted version (which you interpret the meaning of at least partly consciously), then when you next are exposed to the distorted version it seems much clearer. — Isaac

Yes, I mentioned something similar to fdrake as an argument against the idea that raw sensory data is just dumped wholesale and unadulterated into our perceptions, in that instance the way the brain stabilises the image we see despite the fact that the eyes are moving. I can imagine that, as infants, we might have suffered a period of time in which the brain had to learn how to do this.

So there's a sense, then, in which our conscious perceptions are being assessed by our unconscious brains in order to fire/learn correction processes. Is it your assessment that this is done for the purpose of improving our awareness, or is that just a nice side effect?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. — Isaac

Anything that the brain does to raw sensory input before we are aware of the corresponding perception or correction thereto, e.g. sensory priming. For instance, I don't open my eyes in the morning and see the world upside down for a second. My brain already knows which way up to present the world.

Maybe these could be the new 'qualia', but I think, given the sullied history of the term, we'd better reach for something else. — Isaac

Yes, I think Dennett and fdrake would agree with you. My response to this idea was:

But we still, as Dennett says, have properties of consciousness, which is what is actually being identified as qualia even if the properties of qualia have been erroneously ascribed, i.e. the prior guesswork at the properties of those qualia is bad. — Kenosha Kid

I don't think it's a bad word for 'properties of consciousness', rather I think that prior theoretical models for what its properties are are wrong. There's nothing wrong with improving our models; we don't need to come up with a new word for our subject every time we present an improved theory about it.

And that brings us back to where we started. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater leads to confusion and opportunism. Strawson reads, deliberately or not, the attack on the precise definition of qualia as tantamount to saying that consciousness is an illusion and has no actual properties.

Not that this thread or Dennett's article is about judicious use of labels. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether we call them qualia or something else, so long as it's clear that 'qualia do not exist' means 'ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate properties of consciousness do not exist' and not 'properties of consciousness do not exist'.

I mean, concepts are tools for thinking. If a plumber decided to let go of wrenches because he can't really understand wrenches, and moreover wrenches don't exist therefore nobody else can use them, and in the same breath would question the existence of water and tubes, would you hire him?

What measure of consciousness are you using then?

We were talking about definitions, not measures. Any definition of consciousness is incomplete if it doesn't include first-person subjective experience (qualia). I'm not saying first-person subjective experience is a sufficient condition for a definition of consciousness, but it is a necessary condition. Agreed?

As with the allocation of responses to objects, I think any allocation of ownership to responses would be mixed, and mostly post hoc — Isaac

Right, and I think that if qualia are to serve as the updating of the old sense data theory they are supposed to be, then the assignment of the quale to me, the subject, has to be "early", before it's presented to my awareness -- it's not "sweetness" or even "the taste of apples" but "the taste of this apple to me, right now" that is supposed to be presented.

But then the subsystems for processing and packaging "input" from the world, which are admitted to be the domain of neuroscience, would have to be able to label their "output" making rather high-level determinations (ownership, context, particularity), would practically have to be conscious agents themselves. It would be as if the effectiveness of the hierarchical structure in place entitled subsystems operating under top-down constraints to take credit for being thus constrained and count the very constraints they work under as their value added, and all to set up entitling awareness to claim credit for much more than just playing its allotted role.

If that doesn't make any sense, it's only because I'm out of my depth.

Since we are at least conscious of them, I think it helps to bear in mind that, whatever else is going on, and whatever definitions of consciousness we prefer, this presentation is happening. The alternative is, as per that shorter flow, that our bodies just dump raw sensory data straight into our consciousnesses unadulterated, — Kenosha Kid

Yes. Why not? I'm not trying to shoehorn objects of perception into some previous mysterious philosophy of qualia. I'm just saying that we have them and they serve a purpose. That purpose is not necessarily to do philosophy with or chat about them ;) — Kenosha Kid

Also @jamalrob because perceptual intermediaries.

Why not? It's a question of what the "object of perception" refers to.

Earlier in my discussion with @Luke I quoted SEP's characterisation of sense data. They have three parts to their definition:

(1) Sense data are the kind of thing we are directly aware of in perception,
(2) Sense data are dependent on the mind, and
(3) Sense data have the properties that perceptually appear to us.

They let you write things like: "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties that perceptually appear to us", or "the sense datum is presented to consciousness and it consists of the properties we are consciously aware of".

A sense datum is then a kind of completed form of perception, an instance of what is perceived, which is then presented to consciousness. The chain for it goes:

object/environment -> sense datum -> consciousness

Or in accordance with what you wrote:

Raw sensory data -> Pre-processed data -> Formatted object -> conscious apprehension

object/environment->raw sensory data->pre-processed data->formatted object ->conscious apprehension.

Now the "formatted object" in the latter chain satisfies the three components of the definition:
(1) Formatted objects are the kind of thing we are directly aware of in perception. The directness comes from being the antecedent element to conscious apprehension in that chain.
(2) Formatted objects are dependent on the mind. You seem to agree with this
(3) Formatted objects have properties that perceptually appear to us.

(1) Let's focus on the directness of the relationship between the formatted object and conscious apprehension. If we have characterised perception as this chain - there should be a component part of perception that corresponds to a formatted object being submitted to some other faculty in which case we become consciously aware of it. The submission relation should be unidirectional, it's an ordering of events in the process.

The point I'm making against this relationship between perceptual objects and conscious apprehension conceived as a receiver of perceptually formatted objects is that apprehension actually partakes in the formation process of the perceptual features that we are conscious of. There's no submission of a formatted object to a next step, the "submission to conscious apprehension" occurs as part of the formatting stage. AFAIK the formatting stage is the stage at which perceptual features are formed (by some modelling process) and attentionally prioritised (@Isaac) relative to the task one is doing.

The role that task relative attentional priority plays in determining what perceptual features form is well illustrated by the video I linked. If you do the task in the experiment, your perceptual processes will attune so hard to detecting task relevant features (ball passing events) you will only be conscious of large environmental variations that are task relevant. Whatever process is "apportioning conscious awareness" is running dependently on perceptual feature formation and vice versa. That makes the "arrows" go both ways! Conscious apprehension is interweaved in perceptual feature formation and attentional prioritisation (which also interweave in each other). So it's less a submission, and more of a feedback. And notice there's no distinct "conscious apprehension" faculty for perceptual features to submit to once formed.

So the argument goes:
(A) Assume conscious apprehension is a distinct, terminal stage of the process of perception.
(B) So if conscious apprehension had formatted perceptual objects submitted to it, it would be in a a unidirectional relationship with the perceptual process, but whatever "submission process" there is requires it to be a bidirectional relationship with perception.
(C) So from (B), we discharge (A) as it implied a falsehood. We have that conscious apprehension is not a terminal stage of perception, it is interweaved with perception.

Specifically, no formatted objects are "submitted to" a distinct faculty, in other words the "node" of conscious apprehension is actually a process interweaving "object formatting" (perceptual feature formation) and "attentional prioritisation". There's no such node, and if there were such a node the relationship could not be unidirectional.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'pre-processed'. I'm going to take a stab at it assuming you mean to ask if conscious awareness is a necessary feature of bacwkard acting signals. No, but it is usually involved at the higher model levels which, of course, will have an influence over all the models below them. Dream study is probably the best case study for this (again huge pinch of salt required here, very difficult to study), but it seems likely, because of the way memory storage works, that basic object recognition, including limited function, must be able to take place without conscious awareness because they do so during deep sleep dreaming, but appropriate response, form detail and complex function do require some conscious awareness because they only seem to enter stage during REM sleep where you're semi-conscious. — Isaac

So with respect to Isaac's comments there, conscious awareness does seem to "come online" in the higher stages in the formation of our perceptual features. Conscious awareness seems to be associated with upper stages of the our perceptual modelling hierarchy, in which we have isolated the task relevant parameters of our body and environment and are acting upon them. But it's still in a feedback relationship with the lower level models - promoting certain actions, certain adjustments, the formation of certain perceptual features, the exploration of our environment to form new task relevant features etc. It doesn't look like there's a distinct "submission" operation to consciousness, it's more that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with a concentration of bodily effort and attention relative to a task.

Another way of making the point: that conscious awareness "coming online as it is" isn't in a temporal order with perceptual feature formation (this, then that), it's part of the hierarchical order within perceptual feature formation (this is an upper part of that). If the time part is weird ; the apportioning of conscious awareness is a procedural component (systemic part) of perceptual feature formation - rather than a distinct procedure which the results of perceptual feature formation output to.

So how does that relate to the denial of qualia? Well, if we've undermined the existence of a thing which sense data are submitted to, and shown that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with perceptual feature formation, the thing that we'd applied properties to no longer exists as it is theorised. Part (3) of the definition of sense-data:

(3) Sense data have the properties that perceptually appear to us.

If we start thinking of our own experiences in this way, we're going to be talking about private properties that only we have epistemic access to, that inhere within a subjective state that comes from the submission of a perceptual object to it. It's like disbelieving in the existence of a hallucinatory giant chicken then still running away from it.

But if it's false, the sense data no longer have the properties that perceptually appear to us since they don't exist (since they are not in a direct relationship of procedural antecedence with conscious apprehension). If you want to "recover" the normal use of words to describe our experiences, you have to be extremely careful that in talking about "the properties that perceptually appear to us" you don't conjure an object submitted to consciousness which has those properties. In other words, the use of part (3) of the definition (eg, "my subjective felt qualities") easily leads to conceptions that commit the error in (1). If we're talking about "subjective felt qualities that are only in my consciousness", I mean they're... private in some way suspiciously similar to the qualia one criticised (only their receiving subject has epistemic access...) and so on. Thinking of felt qualities under the aspect of (3) commits one to a rabbit hole of qualia like entities.

If instead "the properties that perceptually appear to us" are not conceived as part of a "subjective state presented to my consciousness", they're conceived as part of my agent-environment relation specific to me at the time... They're then "extrinsic relational properties" of the sort given the okay by the paper. So, talk and write how you like, just make sure that how you talk and write doesn't conjure ghosts. And it's really only in this context that the ghosts matter.

Excellent analogy with the programming exame by the way to get at Dennett's point. Quale descriptions can be considered a constructed folk psychology fiction. However, if his implication is to jump to: "Because how we describe quale is inaccurate, thus experiential "feels like" phenomena is thus a fiction..well, thats a bridge to far.

This all feels right to uneducated me, but to be really convincing I think we should also have an account of introspection -- along the lines of, candid self reports look look like blah because this is what's available, or because the purpose of self reports is blorp and in fulfilling those requirements we represent internal processes or state in this familiar way. That's slightly frustrating though because you just cannot let people prone to say "I am now observing a tree" do this!

So step 1 would be figuring out what candid self reports of mental state really look like in the wild (or, you know, the opposite of wild, the lab), maybe noting what purposes they serve, socially for instance, but some of us talk to ourselves pretty regularly. I would guess there are several pretty distinct sorts of introspection. Is getting distracted in the middle of a task and then trying to remember what you were doing, by introspection, very similar to a verbal reaction to how good your sandwich is?

An excellent post, which I'm sure I'll still need to read a few more times. On first impressions:

A sense datum is then a kind of completed form of perception, an instance of what is perceived, which is then presented to consciousness. — fdrake

If this characterisation is incorrect, does it imply that we can't perceive orange juice to be sweet, or cauliflower to be creamy, at a particular time? If no "final product" of perception gets presented to consciousness (at a time, or at all conscious times), then how can we make any judgments about what we perceive?

If this characterisation is incorrect, does it imply that we can't perceive orange juice to be sweet, or cauliflower to be creamy, at a particular time? If no "final product" of perception gets presented to consciousness (at a time, or at all conscious times), then how can we make any judgments about what we perceive? — Luke

I don't think so? The problem with the "subjective state" isn't the "state" it's the "subjective". Similarly with "private state", it's not the "state" which is the problem it's the "private". Denying that perception has properties associated with it (a kind of "there are no minds" thesis) I believe is quite different from saying that when someone tastes something sweet it is predicated of a relation between some perceptual stimulus and the perceiving agent, rather than of a subjective state inherent in the agent produced by a perceptual relation.

Another way of saying it: sweetness as an aspect of a taste relation vs sweetness as an aspect of a taste object. The "instances" of perception as well as their properties become seen as extrinsic (articulated over an environmental+bodily context) and relational (between the agent and that context) rather than intrinsic (embedded within a a subjective experiential unit "in its consciousness") and unary (as a component part of such a unit).

Also consider this bit from the essay:

Even if we are as loathe as Lewis is to abandon the distinction, shouldn't we be suspicious of the following curious fact? If challenged to explain the idea of an intrinsic property to a neophyte, many people would hit on the following sort of example: consider Tom's ball; it has many properties, such as its being made of rubber from India, its belonging to Tom, its having spent the last week in the closet, and its redness. All but the last of these are clearly relational or extrinsic properties of the ball. Its redness, however, is an intrinsic property. Except this isn't so. Ever since Boyle and Locke we have known better. Redness--public redness--is a quintessentially relational property, as many thought experiments about "secondary qualities" show. (One of the first was Berkeley's (1713) pail of lukewarm water, and one of the best is Bennett's (1965) phenol- thio-urea.) The seductive step, on learning that public redness (like public bitterness, etc.) is a relational property after all, is to cling to intrinsicality ("something has to be intrinsic!") and move it into the subject's head. It is often thought, in fact, that if we take a Lockean, relational position on objective bitterness, redness, etc., we must complete our account of the relations in question by appeal to non-relational, intrinsic properties. If what it is to be objectively bitter is to produce a certain effect in the members of the class of normal observers, we must be able to specify that effect, and distinguish it from the effect produced by objective sourness and so forth.

Adding "subjective" to something has an uncanny way of moving it into someone's head.

Edit: as an analogy, "isn't it true that society has abolished all gender inequalities?" said an audience member in a lecture about gender inequality, "how like a man to say!" replied the lecturer. The rhetorical device used there took the audience member's perspective and put it "inside" of one of the constitutive elements of what was being spoken about.... "isn't it true that when we eat stuff it has a taste?" has the "how like a subjective state!" posited in the statement.

If instead "the properties that perceptually appear to us" are not conceived as part of a "subjective state presented to my consciousness", they're conceived as part of my agent-environment relation specific to me at the time... They're then "extrinsic relational properties" of the sort given the okay by the paper. — fdrake

But when I experience the redness of a tomato, I experience it not as a relation between me and the tomato but as something that is confined to the tomato. So the experience of redness is intrinsic, not relational. Of course, the experience of the redness of the tomato is caused by a perceptual relation between me and the tomato, and it stands in the relation of being a part of my consciousness as a whole, and it also stands in relations to other parts of my consciousness, but the redness of the tomato is not experienced as a relation, and in this sense this experience is non-relational.

Another way of saying it: sweetness as an aspect of a taste relation vs sweetness as an aspect of a taste object. The "instances" of perception as well as their properties become seen as extrinsic (articulated over an environmental+bodily context) and relational (between the agent and that context) rather than intrinsic (embedded within a a subjective experiential unit "in its consciousness") and unary (as a component part of such a unit). — fdrake

I wonder if there is really any difference.

Being a relation still involves a combination of, or an interaction between, a subject and an object(s). Object(s) are still filtered/perceived by the subject (or by the subject's brain/body) in a way unique to that brain/body, even if colour or sweetness are labelled as objective properties. If there were no subjective aspect, then you should expect to find that we all have the same subjective (objective?) experiences. However, many of Dennett's examples demonstrate that this is not the case. For example, the case of cerebral achromatopsia in which a subject reports that "everything looked black or grey". I have never had this type of experience before. If colour is an objective property then why does the subject report seeing (e.g.) "bright blue objects as black"?

My failing to recognise the purported distinction is not helped by the fact that Dennett himself seems to be attacking a particular characterisation of qualia, rather than all qualia, as @Kenosha Kid raised earlier. For example, Dennett states:

What, then, of ineffability? Why does it seem that our conscious experiences have ineffable properties? Because they do have practically ineffable properties. — Dennett

As opposed to what other ineffability?

The particular jagged edge of one piece [of the jello box] becomes a practically unique pattern-recognition device for its mate; it is an apparatus for detecting the shape propert M, where M is uniquely instantiated by its mate. It is of the essence of the trick that we cannot replace our dummy predicate "M" with a longer, more complex, but accurate and exhaustive description of the property, for if we could, we could use the description as a recipe or feasible algorithm for producing another instance of M or another M-detector. The only readily available way of saying what property M is is just to point to our M-detector and say that M is the shape property detected by this thing here.

And that is just what we do when we seem to ostend, with the mental finger of inner intention, a quale or qualia-complex in our experience. We refer to a property--a public property of uncharted boundaries--via reference to our personal and idiosyncratic capacity to respond to it. That idiosyncracy is the extent of our privacy. If I wonder whether your blue is my blue, your middle-C is my middle-C, I can coherently be wondering whether our discrimination profiles over a wide variation in conditions will be approximately the same. And they may not be; people experience the world quite differently. — Dennett

As opposed to what other privacy?

What action best describes scrolling down this page and coming across the picture of the two cars and identifying them as cars? I suppose, in a page of mostly text, an image is surprising and, when we become conscious of something surprising, the instinct is to identify it? — Kenosha Kid

Most of the time it seems to be planning. We can recognise planning quite well as systems specific to imagining a scenario seem to be associated with the same neural pathways as would be used in the actual scenario. Not that this is relevant here, but this happens to be my personal favourite 'consciousness' explainer. The reason why we feel like we're living some story is because we're constantly scenario-planning and to do that we have to integrate our current environment into the 'the story so far...' section of the film. What seems to us as 'being instantly aware' of the scene we're in is really a set of imagined actions taken within that scene. So, to use your example of seeing a picture of a car on a page of text, what you later report as 'instant identification' is really instant simultaneous planning of potential scenarios - 'What word would I reach for if I had to communicate that object, what body positions would I take up if I had to interact with that object, what endocrine response would I need if that object came closer, what other systems would I need to bring online if it moved, made a sound...and most importantly of all...what sensory input am I likely to get next as a result of the shapes in this one.

There's quite a lot of evidence for this theory, in the form of seeing these areas light up in response. Interesting aside, there's some consideration that Schizophrenia might be caused by something as simple as getting the post hoc story of these mental events the wrong way round (so that the 'what if...' preparations seem to precede the sensory cause, and therapy aimed at this has has some success.

Anyway, I'm rambling. The point is that there's no reason to think that 'identifying the object' is an event in any singular manner. At best it's a collection of predictions about what might happen next and how you might interact with it in a whole bunch of different brain areas. We only really bring these together for the purpose of the next set of predictions the 'story so far...'

It think this is the main point of attack on qualia, even in the most public, effable, and extrinsic use. There really doesn't seem to be a single act of 'recognition' at all. I do see what you're trying to get at (I think) by saying that, the way it seems to you (recognition) has to still be something and we can use that, explain it etc just like any other mental phenomena. I think that's true, but then 'qualia' would mean something more like 'plot device' and I really don't think that's where qualists wanted to go with it.

I can imagine that, as infants, we might have suffered a period of time in which the brain had to learn how to do this. — Kenosha Kid

Another fascinating (to me) aside, but I must stop getting sidetracked. Have a look at this paper, if you fancy, it's really interesting.

So there's a sense, then, in which our conscious perceptions are being assessed by our unconscious brains in order to fire/learn correction processes. Is it your assessment that this is done for the purpose of improving our awareness, or is that just a nice side effect? — Kenosha Kid

The theory goes that surprise in costly, so brains have evolved to minimise it. There's even a theory that surprise opposes self-constitution and so life itself evolved to minimise it!

Not that this thread or Dennett's article is about judicious use of labels. Ultimately it doesn't matter whether we call them qualia or something else, so long as it's clear that 'qualia do not exist' means 'ineffable, intrinsic, private and immediate properties of consciousness do not exist' and not 'properties of consciousness do not exist'. — Kenosha Kid

I could almost get behind that but would have to add that consciousness may not be the kind of thing that has the kind of properties we're talking about. Consciousness seems to be a set of processes, story building. If that were true, and we were to say "one of the properties of consciousness is...", I'm not sure how to complete that sentence without just offering the definition itself. Surely it should be "one of the results of consciousness is..."

What measure of consciousness are you using then?


We were talking about definitions, not measures. — RogueAI

You said "Reporting on mental activity isn't even a necessary condition for consciousness, let alone a sufficient one.". To make such a claim requires (as far as I can tell) an empirical data-set which includes people being conscious but without any reporting activity going on. In order to acquire that data-set you'd need a measure of consciousness so that you can tell the people with no reporting activity are nonetheless conscious. I just wanted to get clear what that measure is you're using, otherwise I can't have any real understanding of what you're saying.

I'm not saying first-person subjective experience is a sufficient condition for a definition of consciousness, but it is a necessary condition. Agreed? — RogueAI

I don't really know what 'first-person subjective experience' is in this context.

It would be as if the effectiveness of the hierarchical structure in place entitled subsystems operating under top-down constraints to take credit for being thus constrained and count the very constraints they work under as their value added, and all to set up entitling awareness to claim credit for much more than just playing its allotted role. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, that's very much the way I see it. 'The way the apple tasted to me' is simply not something that one has access to at the same level of consciousness as the '...to me' part operates. It think intuition pump 7 illustrates this well. Chase has no more access to the 'taste' of coffee he's processing than the neuroscientist might. The cascade of mental events that his chemoreceptive system started when he sipped coffee has simply had more consequences than he can later gather up and report as being 'the taste of the coffee' in anything other than an arbitrary and constructed manner, and it's only later that ...to me' even enters the picture. For a start, the coffee would undoubtedly signal one response to maybe' sweetness' in one part of the olfactory system, and another to maybe 'sourness' in the occipital system in response to say labelling (the label 'Bitter Coffee' for example). so which one would be 'the way it tasted to me''? Yeah, it makes no sense at all at that level.

The best I think we've got is 'the way I later chose to report the coffee tasted to me'.

it's still in a feedback relationship with the lower level models - promoting certain actions, certain adjustments, the formation of certain perceptual features, the exploration of our environment to form new task relevant features etc. It doesn't look like there's a distinct "submission" operation to consciousness, it's more that the apportioning of conscious awareness is interweaved with a concentration of bodily effort and attention relative to a task. — fdrake

@Kenosha Kid. It looks like @fdrake has already said what I just answered to you - I should really read the whole thread before replying.

Another way of making the point: that conscious awareness "coming online as it is" isn't in a temporal order with perceptual feature formation (this, then that), it's part of the hierarchical order within perceptual feature formation (this is an upper part of that). If the time part is weird (since the higher order parts time lag the lower parts); the apportioning of conscious awareness is a procedural component (systemic part) of perceptual feature formation - rather than a distinct procedure which the results of perceptual feature formation output to. — fdrake

Yes, an important point to make in understanding this. The order in which our sensory signals are received and processed is not that in which we consciously report them as having done so (even to other systems in the brain). so , a classic experiment with this is the advancing circle. The subject is shown a series of flashing dots with circles around them, they flash in sequence to create the illusion of movement. The dot and the circle are in exactly the same place (one around the other) and the brain obviously see them at the same time, but depending on the direction of the induced movement you'll see the circle as being either slightly ahead or slightly behind the dot. You brain re-arranges the timing of the signals to suit what it thinks has most likely happened. a more mundane example is switching a light switch on. You see the light before you feel the switch move. Your conscious knowledge of how switches and lights work re-arranges the signals temporally so that they seem to line up with the order we model them as being in.

Dennett has his own schematic for sensory processing in the brain. Are you familiar with it? What's your assessment of it?