Dennett on Mandik on Dennett and Rosenthal

Out now is Content and Consciousness Revisited: With Replies by Daniel Dennett edited by Carlos Munoz-Suarez and Felipe De Brigard. My chapter in the book is "Conscious-state Anti-realism." Dennett's reply to my chapter is on pp. 218-219, viewable below as well as at this link containing all of his replies.

Here's an excerpt from my chapter:

Dennett’s most famous argument for his first-person operationalism (hereafter, FPO) proceeds by pointing out the alleged empirical underdetermination of theory-choice between “Stalinesque” and “Orwellian” explanations of certain temporal anomalies of conscious experience (Dennett, op. cit., pp. 115-126). The explanations conflict over whether the anomalies are due to misrepresentations in memories of experiences (Orwellian) or misrepresentations in the experiences themselves (Stalinesque).
David Rosenthal (1995, 2005a, 2005b) has offered that his Higher-order Thought theory of consciousness (hereafter, “HOT theory”) can serve as a basis for distinguishing between Orwellian and Stalinesque hypotheses and thus as a basis for resisting FPO. The gist of HOT theory is that one’s having a conscious mental state consists in one’s having a higher-order thought (a HOT) about that mental state.
I’ll argue that HOT theory can defend against FPO only on a “relational reading” of HOT theory whereby consciousness consists in a relation between a HOT and an actually existing mental state. I’ll argue further that this relational reading leaves HOT theory vulnerable to objections such as the Unicorn Argument (Mandik, 2009). To defend against such objections, HOT theory must instead admit of a “nonrelational reading” whereby a HOT alone suffices for a conscious state. Indeed, HOT theorists have been increasingly explicit in emphasizing this nonrelational reading of HOT theory (Rosenthal, 2011; Weisberg, 2010 and 2011). However, I’ll argue, on this reading HOT theory collapses into a version of FPO.

Here's Dennett's reply (click image for larger image or click here):

Here's a video synopsis from back when my project was a contribution in Consciousness Online 4 (2012):

And as a video bonus, here's my rundown of Dennett's theory of consciousness:

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness

I made a short video about Dennett's Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness:

Conscious-State Anti-Realism

A presentation related to my chapter in a forthcoming book about Daniel Dennett. "Conscious-State Anti-Realism" is to appear in Munoz-Suarez, C. and De Brigard, F. Content and Consciousness Revisited. Berlin: Springer. Read the chapter here: http://www.petemandik.com/philosophy/papers/csar.pdf

What's Tye's beef with Dennett?

There's a lot that I like about both Michael Tye's and Daniel Dennett's views on consciousness, so it's a bit of a bummer to read Tye's statements against Dennett in Richard Marshall's recent interview of Tye for 3am magazine. Of Dennett's "Quining Qualia" (one of my all-time favorite papers), Tye says:

...the most charitable way to read him is as holding that experiences themselves are dispositions to believe various things. So, there are no experiences or qualia, conceived of as non-epistemic, non-belief-laden entities. This view seems obviously mistaken...

I don't know, but if it is mistaken it doesn't strike me as obviously so. It also strikes me as significantly similar to Tye's own view. A notion of "poise" plays a key role in Tye's theory of phenomenal character, and I have a hard time reading poise as being anything other than a dispositional property, specifically, a disposition related to belief. Here's Tye describing his own view in the interview:

A mental state has phenomenal character just in case it is appropriately poised (a functional role condition) and it nonconceptually represents a complex of properties.

And:

What representations have to do to get to be experiences, on my view, is that they have to arise at the right level in the information processing. They have to be available to cognitive processes in the right sort of way. They have to be appropriately ‘poised’. Your visual experience of the computer screen before you and its properties is the evidential basis for your belief that there is a computer screen ahead and a whole host of related beliefs.

I'm guessing that Dennett's reaction to that wouldn't be "that's obviously mistaken" but instead "sounds pretty good to me". So what's the rift, here? I'm not seeing it. First-order representationalists about phenomenal character, can't we all get along?

Brains: Call for Proposals: Content and Consciousness 2.0. Four Decades After.

I'm involved with a new book project focusing on the philosophy of mind of Daniel Dennett. The editor is seeking additional contributors. Here's a link to the CFP: Brains: Call for Proposals: Content and Consciousness 2.0. Four Decades After.

Dennett's 1969 account of introspective infallibility

In chapter 5 of Dennett’s 1969 book, Content and Consciousness, he sketches an account of how, without recourse to dualism, our introspective reports can be infallible and we can have “certainty about the contents of our own thoughts” (p. 100). At the heart of Dennett’s sketch is a functional sketch of the brain as an intentional system, especially as it enables persons to make verbal reports on occasions of sensory stimulation. At the heart of this functional/Intentional view is a distinction Dennett borrows from Putnam (1960), a distinction between functional or logical states of a system and physical states of a system. As Dennett states the key idea:

“A particular machine T is in logical state A if, and only if, it performs what the machine table specifies for logical state A, regardless of the physical state it is in” (p. 102).

For both Dennett and Putnam, a significant upshot of such a notion of states is that T can be in A without itself ascertaining that it is in state A. Putnam argues, in a passage Dennett quotes (pp. 102-103): “Indeed,…suppose T could not be in state A without first ascertaining that it was in state A (by first passing through a sequence of other states). Clearly a vicious regress would be involved. And one ‘breaks’ the regress simply by noting that the machine, in ascertaining [anything] passes through its states—but it need not in any significant sense ‘ascertain’ that it is passing through them.”

Dennett elaborates:

“Suppose T ‘ascertained’ it was in state B; this could only mean that it behaved or operated as ifit were in state B, and if T does this it is in state B. Possibly there has been a breakdown so that it should be in state A, but if it ‘ascertains’ that it is in state B (behaves as if it were in state B) it is in state B.

Now suppose the machine table contained the instruction: ‘Print: “I am in state A” when in state A.’ When the machine prints ‘I am in state A’ are we to say the machine ascertained it was in state A? The machine’s ‘verbal report’, as Putnam says, ‘issues directly from the state it “reports”; no “computation” or additional “evidence” is needed to arrive at the “answer”.’ The report issues directly from the state it reports in that the machine is in state A only if it reports it is in state A. If any sense is to be made of the question, ‘How does T know it is in state A?’, the only answer is degenerate: ‘by being in state A’.

[…]

‘Even if some accident causes the printing mechanism to print: “I am in state A” when the machine is not in state A, there was not a “miscomputation” (only, so to speak, a “verbal slip”).’ Putnam compares this situation to the human report ‘I am in pain’, and contrasts these to the reports ‘Vacuum tube 312 has failed’ and ‘I have a fever’. Human beings have some capacity for the monitoring of internal physical states such as fevers, and computers can have similar monitoring devices for their own physical states, but when either makes a report of such internal physical conditions, the question of how these are ascertained makes perfect sense, and can be answered by giving a succession of states through which the system passes in order to ascertain its physical condition. But when the state reported is a logical or functionally individuated state, the task of ascertaining, monitoring or examining drops out of the reporting process.

A Turing machine designed so that its output could be interpreted as reports of its logical states would be, like human introspectors, invulnerable to all but ‘verbal’ errors. It could not misidentify its logical states in its reports just because it does not have to identify its states at all. “(p. 103-104)

Dennett's Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Kinds of Things—Towards a Bestiary of the Manifest Image

Daniel C. Dennett final draft for SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AND METAPHYSICS. Edited by Don Ross, James Ladyman & Harold Kincaid. Oxford U.P. March 25, 2011

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/kindsofthingsfin.pdf

The main goal in the rest of this paper is simply to draw attention to the riotous assembly of candidate things that we find in the manifest image. Wilfrid Sellars (1963) “discovered” the manifest image much the way Columbus discovered the western hemisphere, but he, like Columbus, was more the explorer than the systematic cartographer, and, as just noted, our Mercator has yet to appear. But what about a Linnaeus, a systematic taxonomist of all the things we find in this new, if all too familiar, world? Ontology, it seems to me, has been resolutely reductive and minimalist in its attempts to come up with an exhaustive list of kingdoms, classes, genera and species of things. No doubt the motivation has been the right one: to prepare the disheveled cornucopia for scientific accounting, with everything put ultimately in terms of atoms and the void, space-time points, or (by somewhat different reductive trajectories) substances and universals, events and properties and relations, As is well known, these procrustean beds provide metaphysicians with no end of difficult challenges, trying to fit all the candidates into one austere collection of pigeonholes or another. Where do we put numbers, or melodies, or ideas, for instance? Do numbers even exist, and are there different kinds of existence? Instead of attempting any answers of my own to these oft-asked questions of systematic taxonomy, I am going to push, informally, in the opposite direction, like the bestiarists of yore, recounting with as much ontological tolerance as I can, a few of the neglected candidates for thinghood that everyday folks have no trouble countenancing in their casual ontologies. Metaphysics as folklore studies, you might say.

multiple-drafts theory of consciousness

From Key Terms in Philosophy of Mind (Continuum, 2010):

multiple-drafts theory of consciousness, due to Daniel DENNETT, a theory of CONSCIOUSNESS consistent with PHYSICALISM wherein a conscious state (see CONSCIOUSNESS, STATE) is spread out in both space and time in the brain across multiple instances of what Dennett calls “content fixations” (see MENTAL REPRESENTATION), each of which—the “multiple drafts”—compete for domination in the cognitive system or what Dennett calls “fame in the brain.” Crucial to Dennett’s account of consciousness is a denial of the existence of what he calls “the Cartesian theater”—a single place in the brain where at some specific time which is the onset of consciousness, “it all comes together.” The Cartesian theater is where the various previously unconscious brain events march onto the stage of consciousness before the audience of a HOMUNCULUS who watches the passing show. Dennett regards such a positing of a homunculus as nonexplanatory: How is the homunculus conscious of the show in the Cartesian theater?

Many of the considerations that Dennett provides in support of the multiple-drafts theory hinge on features concerning the application of the CONTENT/VEHICLE DISTINCTION to conscious representations of time. Such representations may themselves (the vehicles) occur at times other than the times that they are representations of (the contents). The importance of the content/vehicle distinction for time representation can be drawn out in contemplation of an
argument Dennett gives concerning the illusory motion and illusory color- change in an effect known as the color-phi phenomenon. In the color-phi phenomenon, the subject is presented with a brief flash of a green circle, followed by a brief flash of a red circle. The two flashes occur in slightly different locations. Subjects report the appearance of motion: a green circle, that moves and becomes red at the point roughly between where the green circle was flashed and where the red circle was flashed. Especially interesting is that subjects report that the green circle turns red before arriving at the spot where the red circle is flashed. The subjects cannot have known ahead of time that a red circle was going to flash, so how is it that they are able to have a conscious experience of something turning to red prior to the red circle’s
flashing? One candidate explanation is that the subject unconsciously perceives the red circle’s flash and the subject’s brain uses that INFORMATION to generate an illusory conscious experience of a green circle changing to red. Another candidate explanation is that the subject consciously perceived only the nonmoving green and red circle flashes and has a false memory of there having been a moving and color-shifting circle. Dennett argues that there is absolutely no basis for preferring one of these candidate explanations over the other. According to Dennett, there is no fact of the matter about consciousness aside from how things seem to the subject (see APPEARANCE), and how things seem to the subject is determined by the BELIEF that is arrived at via the process, smeared out in space and time in the brain, of competitions for fame in the brain via multiple content fixations. Some of Dennett’s critics have accused his argument here of relying on an untenable VERIFICATIONISM.