Dennett vs Strawson- a tale of two turtles

Daniel Dennett responds to an attack by Strawson by affirming-

 of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is,

Most people think consciousness is where thoughts arise. To say 'so and so thought of this' is to say so and so was conscious and this thought arose in his consciousness. 

Let us suppose I am accused of negligence in accepting a bad cheque. The Branch Manager says 'Didn't you think it odd that the Queen of England was buying cheap brandy and rolling tobacco in the middle of the afternoon on a Match Day in Fulham?'

'Yes,' is my reply, 'I did think it odd. As proof, I ask you to zoom in on my raised eyebrows which are clearly visible on the cc tv footage. This shows I was conscious of what I was doing and that the thought did cross my mind that the hairy gentleman might not be our beloved Sovereign. Nevertheless, I proceeded with the transaction because Coutts don't just hand out chequebooks to anybody you know. Indeed, in matters such as this, they honour the cheque and are grateful for the vendor's discretion. You know, our M.D could have got a gong out of this. It is just very unfortunate that Prince Phillip, seeking to show solidarity with New Commonwealth immigrants like myself, raised the customer's skirts to, as he said, indulge in 'a bit of brown'. Still, he'd probably been watching 'The Crown' on Netflix, so allowances should be made.'

The word 'Consciousness' exists because it is a solution to a coordination problem. Most people are aware that they are bound by incomplete contracts and thus may be required to show they were or weren't conscious of certain things or events and that certain thoughts had or hadn't crossed their mind.

The fact that most people need to use the word Consciousness is because most people have to do useful things. Philosophers don't need to use the word because they don't do useful things.
If they choose to use the word they reveal their stupidity more quickly than absolutely necessary. However, because the Academy is Credentialised and because there is a Global Market in gobshittery, this unnecessary revelation can be personally profitable though socially inutile.

In particular, it helps keep long exploded research programs alive as 'availability cascades' trundling over Gadarene cliffs in perpetuity.


Dennett rightly ridicules Strawson 

citing Bertrand Russell as his authority, (and asserting) that “we know something fundamental about the essential nature of conscious experience just in having it.”

Most people don't know anything fundamental or essential about anything whether they have the thing or not. It is pointless to have any such 'knowledge'. Nothing is added to the sequence of assertions- 'that is my hat- I'd know it anywhere. Take it off you hat thief" by stipulating that the hat is 'essentially' or 'fundamentally' mine- indeed, the use of such words indicates that I myself think my claim to be weak in law or otherwise defeasible. On the other hand, adding the word 'fucking' increases the imperative force of the utterance.

How strange it would be for us to know something “fundamental” about the “essential nature” of a phenomenon simply by undergoing it!

It would be very strange if a sensible person underwent any rite of passage without feeling or at least trying to feel some fundamental or essential change had occurred. Indeed, ontologically dysphoric beliefs or codes of conduct can scarcely dam up and release capacitance diversity in any other way.

No doubt, the thing can be gamed. What is meant to be a costly and inward signal may degenerate into cheap talk. Thus I may claim to have experienced some profound change when the Swami laid his hands upon me. This is because I don't want to be chucked out of the Ashram and handed over to the police, but, rather, wish to have another crack at embezzling funds. My conversion is hypocrisy merely.

 Suppose a poor woman has just won the lottery. She may say 'well, I suppose this is how it feels to be rich!' You may say, 'she is lying- or deluding herself. She can't have been fundamentally changed in so short a period, nor is it the case that she has suddenly gained some chrematistic epiphany regarding the 'essential nature' of wealth.' Still, it is true that the lottery winner has a feeling of economic freedom, a manumission from the law of scarcity, and this is certainly an aspect of such 'qualia' as we associate with the possession of wealth.

No doubt, there is no fundamental or essential aspect to anything- least of all anything phenomenological- but that is irrelevant when we are looking at focal solutions to coordination games.

Philosophy- though a discoordination game with respect to anything useful- is no exception to this rule. It is noteworthy that though Dennett's criticism of Stawson is condign, yet he proceeds to make exactly the same mistake-

We can know something important, something that cannot be ignored, while still being in the dark about the “essential nature” of a phenomenon.

Yes, because Schelling focality needn't be tractable- it can be a black-box or a particular type of hand-waving.

Some cancer sufferers think they know something fundamental about their cancer just because it is theirs; but while they no doubt know something about how it seems to them, this is not the kind of knowledge of “something fundamental” to pit against empirical research. 

Why not? An empirical researcher could contract the very illness he studies. Why should his presentation to himself differ from that to a co-worker who has come to assist him? It seems there can only be a qualitative difference here which is of an essentially juristic kind and thus has a 'buck-stopping' mechanism. In other words, 'fundamental' is endogenously defined for this epistemic system.
That these systems are mutable doesn't matter. They belong to a larger class of systems whose terminus ad quem is the extinction of our species. From the Post Res perspective they are all equally fundamental.

Perhaps Dennett thinks essences are available to 'empirical research' because...urm... empirical research is unlike experience. It has magical properties. It opens the door to 'fundamental' things and immutable 'essences'.

I offer a rival theory, which actually tackles the question of how we are able to have “direct acquaintance” with the contents (not the properties) of our experiences. To oversimplify, the beliefs you arrive at “directly”—without effort or noticeable analysis—about your experience of the world neither need nor permit any further process of introspection to enable you to tell yourself, or others, what it is like to be you at the moment.

If human beings evolved by natural selection, they ought not to have any mechanism for this sort of 'direct acquaintance' unless there was some bottleneck during which humans had to coordinate their activities in the manner of social insects and then some other bottleneck such that this mechanism was suppressed, or became a spandrel, for all purpose's save that of confirming Dennett's theory.

Dennett isn't really offering a rival theory. He is proffering what he thinks is a new 'black-box' or more cogent type of 'hand-waving'. If Dennett could really explain 'how we have direct acquaintance with the contents of our experiences' his work would be very valuable to the Judiciary and the Intelligence Services and so forth. Google or Microsoft would be racing each other to build such a machine and fluctuations in their share price would capture expectations regarding the feasibility of the project.

Evolution wouldn't waste resources on hard-wiring a mechanism of the Dennett sort in us because it would have placed us more at the mercy of parasites or predators because if they can capture such an input directly, they can quickly spoof it.
Thus robustness militates for no such mechanism. Aggregation must always be by non-deterministic means.
In any case, what would be the point of having direct acquaintance with the milkman provided he leaves the milk bottles by the door in time for breakfast?
Dennett thinks I need to tell myself, or others, what it is like to be me at this moment. This may be true if I were Marcel Proust but not otherwise.
Why would Evolution bother to give us 'direct acquaintance' for so paltry and inutile a purpose? The thing has no survival value. It corresponds to no known evolutionary bottleneck. There are important reasons to do with inclusive fitness why the opposite of this mechanism- i.e. one whereby others can help you redact the contents of your experience so you come to 'know' something impossible about yourself- might be hardwired in our species.

While we can know many things about the contents of our conscious experience, we have no privileged insight into how this is possible, and we have no immunity to error on this score.

If Knowledge is Justified True Belief, then what I know is directly linked to my theory of how it comes about. This could be a conventional 'black box' or it might involve a socially permissible type of 'hand-waving', but a knowledge claim must always fall back on something like this. Consider what happened when I took a bad cheque while working in the off-license. I justified my belief that the cheque would be honoured by hinting at a possible causal mechanism- viz. that some sexual shenanigans in the Palace had led to a questionable character getting hold of the Queen's cheque book. In the circumstances, it would be reasonable to suppose the cheque would be honoured.

To say 'I know x' is to invite the question 'But how is x possible?' You shrug your shoulders and say 'Dunno, and then gesture at the conventional 'black box' or indulge in the required 'hand-waving'. This is enough to show that you admitted the relevant event to your epistemic base after exercising due care. Obviously, the level of care would vary. But even the expert ultimately has to rely upon an approved black-box or modish type of hand-waving.

There’s a difficult empirical question of how a person’s brain exploits its currently active information to modulate any verbal or non-verbal behavior (or emotional state or memory), and this question is not answered, but only hidden from view, by Strawson’s pontification: “When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it.” Sheer bluster, even if many distinguished philosophers have made similar declarations.

So Strawson is using a black-box Dennett thinks is out of date. But Dennett too is relying on a black box which appears to me to be equally out of date because it features words like 'exploits' and 'currently active information' and distinguishes between verbal & non-verbal and so on.

'Distinguished philosopher' is an oxymoron. As for bluster- it is what pots accuse kettles of.

Strawson uses another misrepresentation to attempt a reductio ad absurdum:
'One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion.'
No, we Deniers do not say this. We say that there isn’t any conscious experience in the sense that Strawson insists upon. We say consciousness seems (to many who reflect upon the point) to involve being “directly acquainted,” as Strawson puts it, with some fundamental properties (“qualia”), but this is an illusion, a philosopher’s illusion. So, unless Strawson has something like papal infallibility, which I doubt, this illusion is not “necessarily” an actual instance of his kind of consciousness. 

So there you have it. One guy says if there's milk in the fridge we are directly acquainted with the cow and the other says no, we are directly acquainted with the milkman though we have never set eyes on him which is lucky for our wives because our sons looks a little too like him.

In the end, Strawson reveals his agenda:
'This is the Great Silliness. We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.'
Strawson apparently thinks that unless his view about consciousness is vindicated, we stand in danger of abandoning our morality, ignoring suffering, depersonalizing people. Christians have had similar worries about the imminent collapse of society if people abandon the concept of an immortal soul. And in the sixteenth century, Philipp Melanchthon urged that some “Christian prince” should suppress Copernicus’s theory that the earth went around the sun, fearing the dire consequences if this truth leaked out. We can handle the truth, Galen. We don’t need your kind of mind to preserve the meaning of our lives. 

Strawson is, it is true, a silly man. Science guys don't give a shit about psilosophy. Nobody does. The subject only exists to be laughed at and to erode public confidence in Academia's Credentialist Ponzi Scheme.
Dennett too is silly. The fucker thinks he is Copernicus though, truth be told, it is the world which revolves around his own ego.

Galen Strawson's reply:

Philosophers use the word “zombie” as a technical term: “a philosopher’s zombie,” Daniel Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained (1991), “is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but is not conscious.”

Behaviourally indistinguishable you say? Cool. We'll try having babies with it. If we can and those babies do well and their babies do well- then, zombies are behaviourally indistinguishable from humans. So what? At some point in our evolutionary history some similar mating must have occurred.
This isn't a thought experiment. It's a story our ex-wives tell about us.

The zombie may, for example, be a piece of brilliant machinery with flesh-like covering that looks and acts like a human being, although “there is nothing it is like to be a zombie; it just seems that way to observers.”

So observers think there is something it is like to be a zombie. It has its own equivalent of oxytocin or adrenalin and so on. If observers, believing zombie have qualia generated by such internal secretions, go on to define a 'zombie conatus' which determines the zombie's fitness landscape, then being a zombie will depend on developing more and more robust black-boxes so as to display this conatus.

Suppose the zombie's inclusive fitness depends on sometimes confirming this theory and sometimes acting quite differently- i.e. acting as though it has this zombie-like inner life when earning its keep doing zombie tasks, but then acting like a human during an emergency and thus endearing itself to the masters of its destiny. If the zombie is 'a brilliant piece of machinery' and if it survives and has descendants then it will feature a black box corresponding to 'feeling like a zombie' alternating with 'feeling for the fellow zombie or non-zombie associate'' in a manner which, for the human observer. cashes out as, if not 'human', then 'human companionable'. The analogy here is with dogs- but, of course, though we breed dogs, dogs can't breed us. Zombies, being behaviourally indistinguishable from us, may not appear to be in an analogous position. Sadly, this is not the case unless they can get us preggers and vice versa.

Women, African Americans and many other groups have written about what DuBois called the 'double consciousness' strategy and Dennett would be familiar with these ideas which feature in films and novels I was familiar with as a teenager. Since the word 'zombie' itself arises out of the hideous legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery. Dennett & Strawson are displaying staggering 'White privilege' in appropriating the term. The 'zombie' availability cascade in academic philosophy, is one of brain-dead Masters cannibalising the brains of their students.

Like the zombie, the 'nigger' or 'female' was not considered to feel 'real' pain or to have genuine consciousness. Truth be told, though having a human shape- the thing had no soul.

Plainly, the zombie is not conscious in the standard, rich, “qualia”-involving sense of “conscious” that I stress and that Dennett rejects. It doesn’t feel pain when its arm is shot off, any more than the Arnold Schwarzenegger character does in the 1984 film The Terminator. 

Strong A.I, as a research program, was dead in the water by the early Seventies. Qualia were thought vital to grow, or train, self-learning neural networks.
In stressful situations, some qualia might be suppressed in humans or anything else which arose by a simulated evolutionary process.

“Are zombies possible?” Dennett asks. “They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies.” Here, his view seems plain. In the book, he adds a footnote—“It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!”—so I hope that I have given sufficient context. But let me provide more (all the quotations in what follows are from Dennett, from various books and papers).

Dennett's Zombies are incompossible with a Universe where humans are the smartest beings on the planet. No thought experiment can depend on their existence because if such a being were encountered we'd be facing a much much bigger problem that would require all our thinking capacity. At that point all the philosophers would be rudely turfed out of the Universities and every smart youngster (such as Dennett himself must have been) would be drafted into the A.I equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

The Ancients thought of God as impassable- i.e. not suffering pain or sorrow or any other 'human' qualia. Certainly, on the evidence of Homer or the Gita etc. Gods could appear as human beings. Some Religious traditions take literally the statement 'Ye are as Gods!'. If you just concentrate hard enough, you will see you aren't a human being at all but rather a God who has forgotten his own power. Not only can you cure your cancer, you can fly off to Jupiter with the hot chick at the deli counter in Waitrose.

How is this Theistic argument different from Dennett's? Strawson, sadly, doesn't say. He is fixated on the notion that this silly argument originated in the twentieth century and that it is sillier- not identical- with religious theories.

“The idea that there is something like a ‘phenomenal field’ of ‘phenomenal properties’ in addition to the informational/functional properties accommodated by my theory” of consciousness “is shown to be a multi-faceted illusion, an artifact of bad theorizing,” he wrote in a 1993 essay, “Précis of Consciousness Explained,” in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research .Here, Dennett is clear about what he doesn’t mean by “consciousness.” We see how he can say, in his reply to me, that “of course, consciousness exists.” He can say this because the zombie is conscious in his terms: it has all the “informational/functional” properties of a human being; it is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human being.
“Let me confirm [Frank] Jackson’s surmise that I am his behaviorist; I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that ‘necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike, they are psychologically exactly alike,’” he writes in another paper that year in the same journal, “The Message is: There is no Medium.” Once again, Dennett holds that a zombie is as conscious as we are, although “there is nothing it is like to be a zombie.” A zombie isn’t conscious at all, in the ordinary sense of the word, but it’s fully conscious in Dennett’s sense of the word, given its “informational/functional properties.”
The same goes for us, according to Dennett. We’re not conscious at all, in the ordinary sense of the word: “We’re all zombies.” He confirms this view in a 2013 podcast. We find in nature “any number of varieties of stupendous organization and sensitivity and discrimination… The idea that, in addition to all of those, there’s this extra special something—subjectivity—what distinguishes us from the zombie—that’s an illusion.”
Consider standard philosophical examples of “qualia”—intense pain, orgasm, visual experience of Times Square at midnight. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett allows that it really seems to us that we have such qualia, but insists that it doesn’t follow that we really have them. I argued that this is a false move, because to seem to have qualia is necessarily already to have qualia, and Dennett moved, in his 2007 paper “Heterophenomenology reconsidered,” published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, to the view that there aren’t even any real seemings: “There are no real seemings… judgments are about the qualia of experiences in the same way novels are about their characters. Rabbit Angstrom [in John Updike’s novels] sure seems like a real person, but he isn’t… If materialism is true, there are no real seemings.”
“When I squint just right,” Dennett writes in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, “it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some kind of special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot. But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake.”
This is “eliminativism” about consciousness, denial of the existence of consciousness. Dennett is not alone. He’s backed up by a good number of present-day philosophers, including recently Keith Frankish, Jay Garfield, and Mark Siderits, as well as psychologists like Stanislas Dehaene. The fundamental mistake they make is to think that there is anything, either in physics or in any other part of science, or indeed in Buddhism (Garfield and Siderits both study Buddhist philosophy), that gives us any good reason to deny the existence of (real) consciousness.
“Sometimes philosophers clutch an insupportable hypothesis to their bosoms and run headlong over the cliff edge,” Dennett writes in a 1995 essay, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies: Commentary on Moody, Flanagan, and Polger,” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. “Then, like cartoon characters, they hang there in midair, until they notice what they have done and gravity takes over.” I agree with Dennett about this, and about much else (including Darwin and religion), but here, his image in incomplete. The trouble with philosophers is that gravity doesn’t take over. They continue to cycle in midair, legs a-blur.

Dennett might seemed to have been one up on Strawson because of Occam's razor but the sad fact is neither are Wiley Coyotes gone off a cliff edge. They are two stupid turtles stranded on their backs, madly waving their stumpy little legs, because they think they are racing each other for some great prize.

The truth is something no one doesn't know. The notion of Consciousness is linked to the notion of Conscientiousness. It is linked to our meta-preference to be more altruistic and less myopic. Thus it exists for us as a mental faculty about which we have different 'black box' theories depending on what type of exercise is required of us at any given moment in our moral and spiritual development or education.

Strawson and Dennett pretended otherwise to pose as Smart and make a living as Savants. Good luck to them! There is a Globalised market for not just Credentialist shite but books by Credentialised shites which can bring the joy of enstoopidification to even the humblest seeker after canned Mock Turtle Wisdom.