“Yes, Mr Dennett, qualia are unscientific… and real”

by Paul Austin Murphy (December 2015)
 

What are Qualia?

(1) ineffable

(2) intrinsic

(3) private

(4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.

What a terribly unscientific list we have there! Indeed, even if we were talking about something else (say quarbs or numbers), that list would still make that something else problematic from a scientific perspective.

(3) Private. The whole of the behaviourist movement (in philosophy and science) had a problem with privacy (as did Wittgenstein). In order to make both psychology and the philosophy of mind scientific, they had to get rid of everything that is private – at least when it came to the mind.

Wittgenstein

From a scientific position, the mind can indeed be seen as a black box –hence behaviourism and the reluctance to deal with consciousness.

Dennett displays his scientific credentials in a rather conventional manner when he deals with colour.

All but the last of these [redness] are clearly relational or extrinsic properties of the ball. Its redness, however, is an intrinsic property. Except that this is not so. Ever since Boyle and Locke we have known better. Redness – public redness – is a quintessentially relational property.

What is Bitterness?

Despite all that, here again one can accept that qualia have no factual status (just as they have no scientific status) at the very same time as accepting that they exist or are real.

If qualia have neither scientific nor factual status, then exactly what kind of status do they have?

Our perceptual experience is always of a more determinate character than our observational concepts which we might use in characterising it.

Perhaps Dennett would now ask:

Conclusion

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) wrote the following:

If Erwin Schrödinger believed that qualia exist, then qualia must exist.

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