Daniel Dennett - Consciousness, Qualia and the "Hard Problem"

[Music] one of the side effects were thinking about consciousness is a sort of inflation that sets in and when people think about consciousness they get themselves baffled and then they explained their bafflement by postulating properties and things that just don't exist there they're there they're kidding themselves they're they're sort of duping themselves into believing in more than it is actually there so it's always good at the outset to alert people to this problem by showing them that they're for instance their vision is not as detailed as they think it is in fact if it weren't for the fact that our eyes dart around continuously little jumps called saccades we'd be we'd have a sort of tunnel vision for the world which would be very limited it seems right now is if I can take in all this detail around me the snow and the trees outside of them and the furniture every detail of your face and everything else but in fact I'm only really taking in the detail from an area that's about the size of my of my thumbnail at arm's length that's what isn't there is actually not being registered by my brain in full detail it seems to be but it isn't now that's just incontrovertible we know that's the case physiology and neuroanatomy establishes that so we already have a pretty powerful illusion the illusion of the plenum the fullness of our experience is that's a trick that a brain is playing honest magicians know a lot about this because they know how easy it is to misdirect people's attention and do things right in front of their eyes that they never see because their perceptual consciousness is not as rich as they think it is the reason people think it's so rich is because whatever they get curious about they get immediate satisfaction but it's it's wherever they shine the spotlight of attention which is not a good metaphor but it's very tempting that area is illuminated that area there's plenty of detail there and they think the details there when they're not attending it's not and hosts of experiments show that so on the one hand armchair introspection speculation armchair theorizing is almost bound to give you a very distorted sense of what the phenomena are and then you try to make a theory from those phenomena and you start off with an inflated catalog so that's the first thing that that we have to do is show people with experiments on themselves how easy it is for them to be wrong about what's actually in their consciousness in the same way that we're not conscious of the whole visual field way we think we are is there a sense in which not even metaphorically but we're not conscious of our whole life the way we think we are oh I think that's true the late Gerald Edelman once said one thing that's remarkable about consciousness is its current annuity I said know what's remarkable about it is its discontinuity how oblivious we are of our own oblivion about so much we don't know what we don't know so any any persons biography contains the hundreds of empty pages [Music] our own brains are not at all transparent to us what's transparent to us is only we discover that we know we're thinking about we know what we're experiencing that is we know we can tell the story about what we're thinking about that's a very important fact and by the way it's we're the only species that can do that the dog can't tell a story about what is thinking about he can't doesn't have language equality a defender wouldn't concede that there's no way to even introspectively know what's happening under the hood you know how the brain does that he would just claim that there's an inner experience to which he has a privileged access and when Chalmers says first-person data that in self is problematic how would you proceed to describe what you're experiencing see I think but my first challenge to Chalmers is the first-person data are the convictions we have about our first-person experience those are good data and I want to explain those release I take it on board one of the things that a theory of consciousness has to explain is all the beliefs that we have about our first-person experience now some people some thinkers have said well that's not enough you got a that's just the beliefs but what the beliefs are about those are the data no think about they just tired the data are your beliefs about what happening in your head you might be wrong so if you're wrong about your beliefs or even about what you perceive and you're there would be a truth about what you're actually what's happening in your experience that not be be revealed by your beliefs and not even be detectable in any way if we have only your beliefs as a source of information about what's going on you it's an interesting wedge that you're trying to draw between the drive between a person's beliefs convictions judgments about their experience and their experience it is possible to be in a situation where if I'm asked which of these two things that I experience I just I don't know or I may say one thing but there is evidence that I've misreported my own experience that evidence is third-person evidence about how I behave behavioral signs of various sorts including internal behavior upset in my nervous system or the you know the hormonal response of my body or whatever belies when I insist on then something's got to give and I think what's obvious that what I have to give is any idea that we are have privileged access to what it's like to be us we have privileged access to what we think it's like to be us but that itself can be wrong as soon as we move away from belief and what we think is the case to what is the case we're moving away from privileged access I have maintained for years that this is all a sequela so the fact that we have language and so we have the problem of articulating what it's like to be us in fact the reason we're so sure it's like something you and me and so we can talk about it we can reflect endlessly on the status of the things that occur to us we've been raised to talk to people about what it's like to be us and what we think and that's a very special talent we have [Music] what is there instead of qalam let's talk gingerly about the term representation there are lots of public representations there's paintings blue period Picasso paintings of things that are blue and there's there's lots of public representations of blue things that involve a blue pigment and these are all public physical properties of representations in the world but there's also representations of blue things in our heads these are not public representations and they do not involve anything like pigment they don't have to pigment is great for bouncing photons off to the eyes that have rods and codes codes in particular but once you're beyond that there's no role for a property like the property of pigment to play but that doesn't mean that there aren't states of the brain that represent to the person who's or agent whose brain it is something being blue for real or not so what are the properties of those representations well who knows it this way there's their their their nervous system states that are identifiable by their conditions of the currents what when do they happen in why we have to be a functionalist about this see that blue door there's something in your brain which says the door is blue this is the difference between having a phenomenal quality of blue instantiated in my brain and having the quality of blue represented by my brain yeah so of course the latter doesn't so I'm looking at a blue door obviously there's nothing blue in my brain there's nothing in the shape of a door in my brain I'm detecting a door there's no second transduction so neuro chemical signals all the way down and I and that door is represented in some area of vision as the door but I'm perceiving that door and if you play around with that area of vision I won't perceive it the same way I could lose my sight altogether the question is pretty basic how do you get from those spike trains to the door that I see outside we have to ask what I call the hard question and then what happens what is your brain it able to do thanks to its being in the state that's in well there's a there's a thousand things your brain isn't able to do when it goes into that state it's enabled to remember other blue doors and compare the blue of this store to the blue that it remembers those other doors to be it could talk about the blue door it could try to buy the blue door but it's also allowing me to see that blue door right there in front well sure it allows you to see it because because your eyes are open and you have lots of spatial information about where the door is how far away it is from your body you can't reach out and touch it you know that but all that this experience that I'm having of seeing the door it's something that's cooked up in my brain I mean it is represented by Spike trains yet what I'm experiencing is not in the form of spike trains it's in the form of the phenomenal properties of my experience it's in the form of the properties of the things in the world that you're experiencing in terms of the properties of the door its actual shape its color the only properties we need are the properties that sentient creatures are unable to detect and discriminate and remember and use to guide their behavior yeah I I get all that and once the the photons hit my retina and once I get all the information of course a lot of processing can occur and a lot of discrimination a lot of disposition to action a lot of downstream effects that that's it's not problematic but I'm still experiencing the perception of this door and that is a fact of my brain who is having this experience and I real of course the door is outside it's not in my brain because there's nothing like that in my ring but it's still there's something happening in that representation that makes it creates a link between this outside object and my experience of it everything that you've just said you are unable to say and motivated to say by machinery in your brain yeah and that's what makes you a conscious articulate human being and what we have to confront is that in the end there is going to be a scientific story of you where you the as self is not a character in the story there's just a living body a living brain and all of that and the first-person story is extractable from that third-person account but it doesn't exist in any other sense that's illusion so is that the path out of this problem is to say that just as the so called cuales that I'm experienced the quality that I'm experiencing the subject the eye that's in there or wherever itself is an illusion is created by the whole system and also with that even the opposition of the subject and object dissolves if the eye is made to be another participant in the in the whole show and if you do that maybe then it's the the difficulty of bridging the gap between the spike trains and the outside world also dissolves well well well yes a theory of consciousness has to include and explain at a bill micro physical level all of the abilities of the subject and if you stop short of that which is almost the standard practice people working unconsciousness no wonder you're baffled because you're not tackling exactly half the problem if you still have somebody home in your theory you haven't got a theory of consciousness yet it's got to be a theory of Machinery cranking away where none of it depends on consciousness yes of course we start with the first-person point of view when we're dealing with consciousness and that's because we are thinking talking theorists and we've noticed that we are and Wow I know things about me that you don't know and you know things about you that I don't know and we but we can communicate and so we've got this phenomenon that we're both participating in and it's not only real it's one of the most important how is it that this living talking body can do that and that living talking body can understand these are perfectly good scientific questions but when we do it we have to recognize that the only answer that will hold up in the long run is one which doesn't explain away the first-person point of view but explain the first-person point of view in third personal terms that's what it is to have a first-person point of view we don't explain away color when we get the electromagnetic theory of color we explain what color is now there's a temptation for people to open that gosh color isn't real it's real it's just isn't what you thought it was say with consciousness [Music] my son asked me that he said so if you understand all this about consciousness and will you won't you lose something about the you know the experience itself though aren't you afraid that it becomes disenchanted in some in some way and my answer was to say well the the mechanisms natural and cultural that are at the source of the richness of your consciousness are so powerful that you would really have to do a lot of destructive work to do break down the would you agree with that I mean well I know I think yes I do I do agree with that I think that the sources of Enchantment are of Marvel of Wonder are so so copious is so much to be enchanted by that we can readily abandon jettison a few myths and still have plenty to savor plenty to love and enjoy and respect and admired and be thrilled by but I do think that we should acknowledge that people who are worried about disenchantment from a theory of consciousness they're not wrong to take that seriously because it is the case that as you grow up you find you can no longer occupy perspectives of innocence that you once had you can appreciate them you can see your own children being fascinated charmed baffled amazed by things that don't fasten a torch or amaze you anymore because you understand them so you've lost the ability to be gobsmacked by some feature of the world that used to just knock your socks off that's true that's one of the prices you pay for getting more information in some cases once you start digging you become even more gobsmacked I that that's the other side of it that is I myself think the bargain is obvious and it obviously favors more knowledge rather than less here's the the fact that it chance me now in my body there are trillions and trillions of little motor proteins and they're moving stuff around in cells they are walking along on little reco to Buell highways and where do they get their power from they get a lot of their power from the chaotic bouncing round of water molecules inside the cell they're sailing there they're exploiting the uncontrolled energy in the water molecules to push them forward and they have ratchets in effect so that they they can control which way they which way they go harnessing the energy of the turbulence in their environment what a brilliant idea the idea that I've got trillions a little helmsman in there steering their ships along their goods I couldn't be aligned without it that's that's something you wanted you something you want to know that's something so you ask you want to replace the question the hard question the hard problem by the hard question which is and then what happens so what happens after the material has entered consciousness or the brain and what are the effects of that in a sense I suppose our experience of the world our qualia are themselves already part of the answer it's a beginning of the answers since they contain dispositional properties emotions so this already will already downstream from yes but you have to let it let's let's take a loaded case let's take pain some people want to say pain as a koala it's just intrinsically awful and learn bells go off in my head what do you mean intrinsically awful that is such a cop-out nobody knows what it could mean for something to be intrinsically awful it's like saying gold is intrinsically valuable we've gone off the gold standard turns out that was a useful crutch for a long time but we now understand that money doesn't need any intrinsic economic value similarly pain the idea of something being intrinsically painful that just that just creates a nugget of mystery if pain is awful and it is it's because of what it does it's what of the effects it has on you if it didn't have those effects on you it wouldn't be awful well what effects does it happen it interrupts your train of thought it prevents you from enjoying your meal it prevents you from moving your limbs the way you want to it intrudes on your thinking it dominates your all your other senses it overpowers your systems of attention so all you end up doing is just lying in a in a in a helpless state that's what pain that's what's bad about pay if you could eliminate all those and then what happens affects the idea that pain would still be the intrinsic awful dissipate no other wouldn't it's very convincing when you break down pain like that and we can see we can be like I can easily see pain dissolve as you take brick by brick you take it down and there's nothing else apart from the sum of those effects that you but can you do the same thing with the perception of a blue sky alright so I look at the blue sky now how and then what happens well it all depends on Who I am and what I wanna know and maybe what happens is that the particular shade of blue and the together with the breeze walking over my face as I lie on the grass in the woods or something looking up at the blue sky it conjures up memories of other occasions so and I've looked at the sky blue sky is good weather it means it's not raining it's snowing I have an inexhaustible fountain of associations recollections biases which are all either triggered or trigger Abell by my looking at the sky now we can start cutting those off piece by piece and suppose that the blue sky can no longer be recognized by me as a sign of good weather suppose it no longer Kindles recollections or memories suppose it has no effect on my bodily state on my heart rate on my respiration on my galvanic skin response we're going to subtract all of these things at some point it's luckily that I'm still conscious of the blue sky my eyes are opened Joshua Joshua Rothman in his lovely profile of me in The New Yorker at the end of that has a sort of personal coda he says that he was very much a skeptic of my position until this is very moving to me he reflected on it while watching his mother who was getting Alzheimer's and who was sort of slowly fading out of existence and then by subtraction my theory began to make sense to him because he began to see that the answer in her case too and then what happens was getting smaller and smaller there was less happening in her as a result of seeing a blue sky or hearing his voice or holding his head the answer - and then what happens was diminishing diminishing diminishing diminishing and what my theory of consciousness says and you've already granted them away for pain when you finish that job there's no consciousness left consciousness is the sequela you [Music] generally the burden of a naturalist is in a sense greater than of an idealist or doulas because if your naturalist you cannot leave loose ends you can't plug a skyhook there or a soul over this everything has got a gel has got to fit together so you can also leave the subject in your theory for the same reason I recently compared the problem that faces the naturalist here as a much grander version of the problem that faces the naturalist trying to explain a magic trick you see some gobsmacking magic trick and you can't explain it do you think whoa isn't that something but you know what the rules are for explaining a magic trick and you know there's no such thing as real magic necromancy and sorcerers terms like so the task is daunting but heaven's sake don't give up and and don't don't just say oh no this has got to be this has got to be sorcery and it seems to me that the duelists and the idealists are basically they're copying out they're saying there's got to be some sorcery here I find most of your auditions say this but most of your ideas pretty much irresistible I'm I'm a devoted reader and defender of your of your work and but what but my paranoid self every once in a while you know tells me that I might be wrong and and and everybody's been wrong before and every every thinker every period of history has been you know fell for the obvious of its time and so I'd say I mean it's a question I would have liked to ask Higa but I'm asking you did you sometimes think that you might be completely wrong I'm always happy to entertain critics objectors like like David Chalmers or others who challenge you know very fundamental way what I work it and then I see what their challenge amounts to and if I sometimes have to scratch around pretty hard for a few weeks or months before I can see how to answer something it only it only strengthens my conviction that I know I think I've got it right and you know right or wrong this has been the trajectory of my career when I was in graduate school materialism physicalism with regard to the brain hit me like a ton of bricks oh I see learning is a sort of evolutionary process that goes on in the brain at the time I didn't know much about evolution evolution nothing about the brain but the idea that consciousness and content could be explained in naturalistic terms struck me as the best bet in town and so I went after it and over the years I never encountered a road block that I thought I hadn't overcome just in fact it seemed over the decades I just kept hurting the craic and the results kept coming out yeah well this is looking better and better and I think to this day I think I I think I got lucky I think I had picked up the right end of the stick but I was in graduate school and had been just sort of carving away on it ever since [Music] seeing the world through my perspective on seeing the world unconsciousness has been an enriching feature of my life because it's made me pay attention to a lot of things I wouldn't have paid attention to otherwise and to be both puzzled and delighted by features of the world which might just have escaped me otherwise I think that it has if anything heightened my sense of the importance of letting people know when you still can the you know that you love them that you admire them that they've made an influence on you so that so that they know because it's a nice thing to know and you may not be able to you may never see them again and not believing in any afterlife I tend I think fairly comfortably resist Oh ignoble urges that can be over one but one thinks about people have then you're wrong or this represented you or something it's it's it's not as big a transgression as it might be if I have a more essentialist view of goodness and badness and responsibility people make mistakes people that are fundamentally good make mistakes well I hope you keep turning the crank for many more years to come then so do I thank you very much for this interview [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Les Films Primatice

Views: 29,450

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Keywords: Daniel Dennett, Dennett, consciousness, qualia, hard problem, louis godbout, Chalmers, philosophy of mind, phenomenal properties, functionalism

Id: eSaEjLZIDqc

Length: 41min 20sec (2480 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 05 2020