Dump Dennett's inuition pumps!

 Qualia are 'introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives'- stuff like what I feel when I see an apple when I'm in a certain mood. Dennett employed no less that 15 intuition pumps to deny they exist. All were shit.

In a chapter titled 'Quining Qualia' he explains-

Which idea of qualia am I trying to extirpate? Everything real has properties,

Nothing really real- i.e. the Noumenal 'Nirguna Brahma'- has properties save in the manner that wholly unreal things- e.g. flying unicorns which fart rainbows- have properties- viz. by arbitrary ascription for some specific purpose. 

and since I don't deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties. I grant moreover that each person's states of consciousness have properties in virtue of which those states have the experiential content that they do. That is to say, 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, but these properties are so unlike the properties traditionally imputed to consciousness that it would be grossly misleading to call any of them the long-sought qualia.

I often claim that it is grossly misleading to say that the whiskey in your drink's cabinet is your property. Surely, it belongs to he who very kindly breaks into your house and drinks it for you? 

It is easy to say that an ascription of a property is mendacious or defeats the purpose of the exercise or something of that sort. But this is merely an arbitrary assertion backed up by sophistry 

Qualia are supposed to be special properties, in some hard-to-define way.

All sorts of properties are hard to define. So what? Let them be 'Tarskian primitives'. It may be that, most of the time or in most contexts there is nothing special about a particular property. But it may turn out to be important or special in some other context. 

My claim--which can only come into focus as we proceed--is that conscious experience has no properties that are special in any of the ways qualia have been supposed to be special. The standard reaction to this claim is the complacent acknowledgment that while some people may indeed have succumbed to one confusion or fanaticism or another, one's own appeal to a modest, innocent notion of properties of subjective experience is surely safe. It is just that presumption of innocence I want to overthrow. I want to shift the burden of proof, so that anyone who wants to appeal to private, subjective properties has to prove first that in so doing they are not making a mistake. This status of guilty until proven innocent is neither unprecedented nor indefensible (so long as we restrict ourselves to concepts).

But it applies to itself. We could say any philosophical attack on any other philosophical argument is in bad faith and guilty till proven innocent.  

A scientific argument, e.g. one based on the existence of the aether- may be arbitrary and may be refuted by a crucial experiment. It may be that a philosophical argument against the aether motivated the experiment. The result was to show the 'extension' of 'aether' was empty in the real world. But such is not currently the case with 'qualia'.

Today, no biologist would dream of supposing that it was quite all right to appeal to some innocent concept of elan vital.

The term wasn't used by biologists at any time.  Still, there may be something like a 'constructor theory' in the Life Sciences.

Of course one could use the term to mean something in good standing; one could use elan vital as one's name for DNA, for instance, but this would be foolish nomenclature, considering the deserved suspicion with which the term is nowadays burdened. I want to make it just as uncomfortable for anyone to talk of qualia--or "raw feels" or "phenomenal properties" or "subjective and intrinsic properties" or "the qualitative character" of experience--with the standard presumption that they, and everyone else, knows what on earth they are talking about.

Why stop there? Why not try to shame all philosophers into giving up their utterly useless lucubrations? Suggest to them that everybody else is laughing at them behind their backs. Also, they are all serial killers and must prove their innocence with respect to any murder in the vicinity.

Intuition pump #1: watching you eat cauliflower. I see you tucking eagerly into a helping of steaming cauliflower, the merest whiff of which makes me faintly nauseated, and I find myself wondering how you could possible relish that taste, and then it occurs to me that to you, cauliflower probably tastes (must taste? ) different. A plausible hypothesis, it seems, especially since I know that the very same food often tastes different to me at different times. For instance, my first sip of breakfast orange juice tastes much sweeter than my second sip if I interpose a bit of pancakes and maple syrup, but after a swallow or two of coffee, the orange juice goes back to tasting (roughly? exactly?) the way it did the first sip. Surely we want to say (or think about) such things, and surely we are not wildly wrong when we do, so . . . surely it is quite OK to talk of the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t, and ask whether it is just the same as or different from the way the juice tastes to Dennett at time t', or the way the juice tastes to Jones at time t. This "conclusion" seems innocent, but right here we have already made the big mistake. The final step presumes that we can isolate the qualia from everything else that is going on--at least in principle or for the sake of argument.

No it doesn't. We just need to distinguish it or infer it is a distinguishable causal factor. We don't need to presume we can isolate it anymore than we think we can isolate our nose from our face.  

 ...the mistake is not in supposing that we can in practice ever or always perform this act of purification with certainty, but the more fundamental mistake of supposing that there is such a residual property to take seriously, however uncertain our actual attempts at isolation of instances might be.

You can't separate your nose from your face even if you pull it really hard. Your fundamental mistake was to think you have a nose. Also, you got no dick and everybody is making fun of you. 

intuition pump #2: the wine-tasting machine. Could Gallo Brothers replace their human wine tasters with a machine? A computerbased "expert system" for quality control and classification is probably within the bounds of existing technology... Such a machine might well perform better than human wine tasters on all reasonable tests of accuracy and consistency the winemakers could devise  but surely no matter how "sensitive" and "discriminating" such a system becomes, it will never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine: the qualia of conscious experience!

I suppose a computerized system for quality control on juices or even beer might already have been implemented. Fine wines, however, are not beverages simply. We believe that to appreciate them, we need to develop a discerning palate. The expert wine-taster educates the oenophile community in the same way that the leading art critic explains to why the ghastly daubings of heroin addicts are actually aesthetic masterpieces. 

The fact that our 'qualia' when drinking expensive champagne change suddenly when we are told it is a cheap and cheerful Prosecco suggests that there is no simple supervenience on chemistry or biology here. There is some added cognitive factor of a subjective and perhaps 'dialectical' type. Qualia are 'intensions' which have unknown, perhaps unknowable, extensions. But perhaps this is also true of every other phenomena we can name.  

Whatever informational, dispositional, functional properties its internal states have, none of them will be special in the way qualia are. If you share that intuition, you believe that there are qualia in the sense I am targeting for demolition. What is special about qualia? Traditional analyses suggest some fascinating second-order properties of these properties

Qualia are themselves 'second order properties' ascribed to some imputed activity of the brain or nervous system.  

First, since one cannot say to another, no matter how eloquent one is and no matter how cooperative and imaginative one's audience is, exactly what way one is currently seeing, tasting, smelling and so forth, qualia are ineffable

only in the sense that everything is. What matters is whether for any given purpose you can convey useful information accurately enough. I can't tell the optician what I'm seeing but I can read off the chart as she swops lenses. The same is true of qualia. 'I feel sad when I see this apple- well, maybe not sad exactly- it's more a sort of sharp stab of remorse for lost innocence...but, no, that isn't it either. I am reminded of what Pushkin wrote about the Countess Anastasia whose misfortune it was to have been married off at a young age to a homosexual potato.' 

--in fact the paradigm cases of ineffable items. According to tradition, at least part of the reason why qualia are ineffable is that they are intrinsic properties--

ascribed to imputed, but equally intrinsic, brain functions.  

which seems to imply inter alia that they are somehow atomic and unanalyzable.

If atoms can be analysed into more elementary particles, why not anything else? Even if the thing itself is not irreducible, it might be simulated well enough for some specific purpose 

Since they are "simple" or "homogeneous" there is nothing to get hold of when trying to describe such a property to one unacquainted with the particular instance in question.

Simple things- like snow- may be easy to name. They are difficult to describe to people with no experience of them. 

Moreover, verbal comparisons are not the only cross-checks ruled out. Any objective, physiological or "merely behavioral" test--such as those passed by the imaginary wine-tasting system-- would of necessity miss the target (one can plausibly argue), so all interpersonal comparisons of these ways-of-appearing are (apparently) systematically impossible.

Interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible but, for any useful purpose, they can be made easily enough. That's why the Economy works well enough. But the same is true of language. I suppose one could invoke a result by Chichilnisky which shows why if preference and endowment diversity doesn't meet a Goldilocks' condition, there will be no market or language game for the thing in question. Thus, some qualia are things we do talk about or which marketing guys have focus groups to discover. Other qualia may not be- at least for the moment.  

In other words, qualia are essentially private properties.

like our feelings- till the moment seems right to reveal them and you find out to your chagrin that the camel just wants to be friend. It is actually in this crazy complicated relationship with Barbara Streisland. What? I am not speaking of myself here.  Back in the Seventies, it was the sort of thing which could have happened to anybody. Anyway, I never resented Barbara for stealing my role in 'Hello Dolly'. But Yentl? Gimme a break!

And, finally, since they are properties of my experiences (they're not chopped liver, and they're not properties of, say, my cerebral blood flow--or haven't you been paying attention?), qualia are essentially directly accessible to the consciousness of their experiencer (whatever that means) or qualia are properties of one's experience with which one is intimately or directly acquainted (whatever that means) or "immediate phenomenological qualities" (Block, 1978) (whatever that means).

Nothing essential need be predicated of a property you ascribe to something imputed to brain functions. It is perfectly possible that there are possible worlds where that property might have a wholly different spectrum.  

They are, after all, the very properties the appreciation of which permits us to identify our conscious states.

Only by imputation. Scientists may discover an actual mechanism or, at least, a useful Structural Causal Model which will 'close' some of these philosophical problems.  

So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are (1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness

So they are like having a crush on this really cool Drama instructor you have who also happens to be a camel who may or may not have had an on-off relationship with Barbara Streisland. 

Thus are qualia introduced onto the philosophical stage.

As a way for philosophers to say mean things about each other.  

They have seemed to be very significant properties to some theorists because they have seemed to provide an insurmountable and unavoidable stumbling block to functionalism, or more broadly, to materialism, or more broadly still, to any purely "third-person" objective viewpoint or approach to the world (Nagel, 1986).

You don't need to be a philosopher to reject crude types of reductionism. Just because I once asked out a camel doesn't mean I think I am Omar Sharif. I could be Barbara Streisland.  

Qualia seem to many people

especially in Sub-Saharan Africa 

to be the last ditch defense of the inwardness and elusiveness of our minds, a bulwark against creeping mechanism.

Minds can go fuck themselves. It is my immortal soul which will get me into a Paradise where all the camels have low self-esteem and are grateful for any smidgeon of attention. It is important that souls be unique- otherwise some other camel-fucker might get my spot- but minds don't matter because, truth be told, they are full of shit.  

They are sure there must be some sound path from the homely cases to the redoubtable category of the philosophers, since otherwise their last bastion of specialness will be stormed by science.

Their special place is their bum-hole. Dennett is saying the Scientists will fuck the philosophers in the ass.  

This special status for these presumed properties has a long and eminent tradition. I believe it was Einstein who once advised us that science could not give us the taste of the soup.

because it was a 'gestalt'- a whole bigger than its parts. I suppose we would speak of an 'emergent'. 

Could such a wise man have been wrong? Yes, if he is taken to have been trying to remind us of the qualia that hide forever from objective science in the subjective inner sancta of our minds.

Nope. Gestaltism was big back then. Reichenbach was a pal of Kurt Lewin.  

There are no such things. Another wise man said so-- Wittgenstein (1958, esp.pp.91-100). Actually, what he said was: The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something; for the box might even be empty. --No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. (p.100)

Schrodinger's cat was in the box. Witlesstein was babbling nonsense.  

and then he went on to hedge his bets by saying "It is not a something, but not a nothing either! The conclusion was only that a nothing would serve just as well as a something about which nothing could be said." (p.102)

Nothing good can be said about a shithead who didn't get that only game-theory can explain language games.  

Both Einstein's and Wittgenstein's remarks are endlessly amenable to exegesis, but rather than undertaking to referee this War of the Titans, I choose to take what may well be a more radical stand than Wittgenstein's.  Qualia are not even "something about which nothing can be said"; "qualia" is a philosophers' term which fosters nothing but confusion, and refers in the end to no properties or features at all.

Why not just embrace logical positivism and say Philosophy is just semantic confusion? The trouble is a lot of philosophers have tenure. Also, the thing is cheap to teach so maybe the thing can cross-subsidize the football team.  

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?

We don't. But, if we were brought up in the same culture and have good eyesight, there are some complicated way to confirm that we are pretty similar in this respect for any particular purpose.  

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. The intuition that this hypothesis is systematically unconfirmable (and undisconfirmable, of course) has always been quite robust, but some people have always been tempted to think technology could (in principle) bridge the gap.

It does- if the thing matters enough commercially or for some other such purpose.  

Suppose, in intuition pump #4: the Brainstorm machine, there were some neuroscientific apparatus that fits on your head and feeds your visual experience into my brain (as in the movie, Brainstorm, which is not to be confused with the book, Brainstorms). With eyes closed I accurately report everything you are looking at, except that I marvel at how the sky is yellow, the grass red, and so forth. Would this not confirm, empirically, that our qualia were different? But suppose the technician then pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees and reinserts it in the socket. Now I report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth. Which is the "right" orientation of the plug? Designing and building such a device would require that its "fidelity" be tuned or calibrated by the normalization of the two subjects' reports--so we would be right back at our evidential starting point. The moral of this intuition pump is that no intersubjective comparison of qualia is possible, even with perfect technology.

The problem with this argument is that it can be easily refuted thus 'You have just told us you eat your own shit. I don't know why you did so. We were actually discussing qualia. Still, it must be said, your confession of coprophagy explains so much about your personality'. You may deny that you admitted coprophagy. But how can you be sure that what you said wasn't only receivable by me as an admission that you eat your own shit? In other words, the moment you start saying you can't make interpersonal comparisons of utility or qualia, your interlocutor is at liberty to act as if no interpersonal semantics is possible. Everybody hears something different. 

The solution is easy. For some specific purpose, we can always do good enough interpersonal comparisons unless preference or endowment diversity is too great. 

So matters stood until someone dreamt up the presumably improved version of the thought experiment: the intra-personal inverted spectrum. The idea seems to have occurred to several people independently (Gert, 1965, Putnam, 1965, Tayler, 1966, Shoemaker, 1969, 1975, Lycan, 1973). Probably Block and Fodor (1972) have it in mind when they say "It seems to us that the standard verificationist counterarguments against the view that the 'inverted spectrum' hypothesis is conceptually incoherent are not persuasive." (p.172.) In this version, intuition pump #5: the neurosurgical prank, the experiences to be compared are all in one mind. You wake up one morning to find that the grass has turned red, the sky yellow, and so forth. No one else notices any color anomalies in the world, so the problem must be in you. You are entitled, it seems, to conclude that you have undergone visual color qualia inversion (and we later discover, if you like, just how the evil neurophysiologists tampered with your neurons to accomplish this). Here it seems at first--and indeed for quite a while--that qualia are acceptable properties after all, because propositions about them can be justifiably asserted, empirically verified and even explained. After all, in the imagined case, we can tell a tale in which we confirm a detailed neurophysiological account of the precise etiology of the dramatic change you undergo. It is tempting to suppose, then, that neurophysiological evidence, incorporated into a robust and ramifying theory, would have all the resolving power we could ever need for determining whether or not someone's qualia have actually shifted. 

Actually, our two eyes see colours slightly differently. We don't notice this till we have to use one eye only for a period and then only the other eye for a period.  

But this is a mistake.

No. 

It will take some patient exploration to reveal the mistake in depth, but the conclusion can be reached --if not secured--quickly with the help of intuition pump #6: alternative neurosurgery. There are (at least) two different ways the evil neurosurgeon might create the inversion effect described in intuition pump #5: (I) Invert one of the "early" qualia-producing channels, e.g., in the optic nerve, so that all relevant neural events "downstream" are the "opposite" of their original and normal values. Ex hypothesi this inverts your qualia. (II) Leave all those early pathways intact and simply invert certain memory-access links--whatever it is that accomplishes your tacit (and even unconscious!) comparison of today's hues with those of yore. Ex hypothesi this does not invert your qualia at all, but just your memory-anchored dispositions to react to them. On waking up and finding your visual world highly anomalous, you should exclaim "Egad! Something has happened! Either my qualia have been inverted or my memory-linked qualia-reactions have been inverted. I wonder which!" The intrapersonal inverted spectrum thought experiment was widely supposed to be an improvement, since it moved the needed comparison into one subject's head.

But we don't know if the thing is 'compossible'. We do know that our two eyes see colour slightly differently and there is a incrementally improving Structural Causal Model of this.  There are some serious illnesses which cause different eyes to see different colours. 

But now we can see that this is an illusion,

This guy tells us stupid fairy stories and then talks about seeing some nonsense is an illusion.  

since the link to earlier experiences, the link via memory, is analogous to the imaginary cable that might link two subjects in the original version. This point is routinely--one might say traditionally--missed by the constructors of "intrasubjective inverted spectrum" thought experiments, who suppose that the subject's noticing the difference--surely a vivid experience of discovery by the subject--would have to be an instance of (directly? incorrigibly?) recognizing the difference as a shift in qualia.

which is all it is. By definition 'qualia' belong to the brain able to report on them. Nothing else matters. 

But as my example shows, we could achieve the same startling effect in a subject without tampering with his presumed qualia at all.

If he sees something different his qualia have changed. Tampering does not matter.  

Since ex hypothesi the two different surgical invasions can produce exactly the same introspective effects while only one operation inverts the qualia, nothing in the subject's experience can favor one of the hypotheses over the other.

This is irrelevant. Either you notice a change in how you see colour or no change in qualia has occurred no matter what tampering may have gone on. It is a different matter that specific qualia may be multiply realizable 'emergents' or 'gestalts' with different degrees of 'redundancy' or 'robustness'. But that doesn't alter the fact that we can say they change when people say they are seeing colours differently 

So unless he seeks outside help, the state of his own qualia must be as unknowable to him as the state of anyone else's qualia.

Similarly, if somebody cut off his dick, he would not know this unless he got outside help because he would just assume his brain had been hooked up to some dickless person's body. True his peeing or wanking qualia may have seemed to change for him but how the fuck would he know if this were actually the case?  

Hardly the privileged access or immediate acquaintance or direct apprehension the friends of qualia had supposed "phenomenal features" to enjoy! The outcome of this series of thought experiments is an intensification of the "verificationist" argument against qualia.

Sadly, you have to a fucking scientific experiment to verify if sciencey things like the aether exist. Qualia however are like Utility of feelings of various sorts.  

If there are qualia, they are even less accessible to our ken than we had thought.

So what? They could be like 'inaccessible cardinals' which exist in most types of math we do.  

Not only are the classical intersubjective comparisons impossible (as the Brainstorm machine shows), but we cannot tell in our own cases whether our qualia have been inverted--at least not by introspection. It is surely tempting at this point--especially to non-philosophers--to decide that this paradoxical result must be an artifact of some philosophical misanalysis or other, the sort of thing that might well happen if you took a perfectly good pre-theoretical notion--our everyday notion of qualia--and illicitly stretched it beyond the breaking point. The philosophers have made a mess; let them clean it up; meanwhile we others can get back to work, relying as always on our sober and unmetaphysical acquaintance with qualia.

The problem is that we don't really need the word or the underlying concept. Why? We don't greatly care about minds. Bodies matter and souls might matter even more but mind stuff does not matter save in so far as it relates to mental health. But we'd rather take a pill for that. 

Philosophy of Mind like the Philosophy of language has proved useless and stupid. Dennett's 'intuition pumps' confirm this view. But it doesn't go far enough. Why not just say that Philosophy is shit? Engrams may be useful to scientists. Qualia aren't useful to man nor beast. But, if you have to have stupid and useless people to teach useless and stupid people as part of a Credentialist Ponzi Scheme, why not just turn a blind eye to the Philosophy Department? After all, there is plenty of other types of more actively evil craziness running amok on Liberal Arts Campuses.