10a. Dennett, D. (unpublished) The fantasy of first-person science
Once we can pass the Turing test -- because we can generate and explain everything that cognizers are able to do -- will we have explained all there is to explain about the mind? Or will something still be left out?
Reading: Dennett, D. (unpublished) The fantasy of first-person science.
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“Once we can pass the Turing test — because we can generate and explain everything that cognizers are able to do — will we have explained all there is to explain about the mind? Or will something still be left out?”
ReplyDeleteThis passage raises a thought-provoking question about the limits of science in understanding the brain. Dennett suggests that even if we could replicate and predict all cognitive behavior perfectly, there might still be aspects of subjective experience (what it feels like to think, perceive, or feel) that doesn't have an explanation. I find this idea compelling because it highlights the difference between understanding the mind in terms of functions and behaviours versus understanding the first-person, qualitative experience. It also challenges a common assumption in psychology and neuroscience that observing and modelling behaviour is enough to fully explain 'mental life'. Dennett pushes us to consider whether some elements of consciousness are inherently private, or if they can eventually be captured through objective scientific methods. This passage makes me reflect on how far science can go in explaining our inner experiences and truly how “hard” the hard problem of consciousness is. It’s a reminder that understanding the brain might require not just technical knowledge, but also philosophical reflection on what it really means to experience the world and why life matters.
Rachel, I like how you spoke about whether any aspect of behavior might be left out even if we could explain all behavior. One point that Dennett wrote that struck me is that we should not treat our own thoughts and feelings as some kind of private access to the truth. He actually uses the term "fantasy" to describe how we are misled to believe that just going inside our minds and experiencing allows us to access some internal science that has not been made valid & open to others or tested & confirmed with evidence. Dennett seems to say: yes, we all have experiences, but those experiences can also mislead us in the same way that an optical illusion misleads us.
DeleteThe takeaway for me was not that a first-person experience does not matter, of course it does, but it cannot stand on its own. We need the combination of "it feels like this" with a shared, testable approach in order to study the mind. This made me consider that the harder part is not so much debating whether there is a first-person experience or the science but understanding how to mesh both ends of the spectrum without having to pretend the other gets the whole job done on its own.
***EVERYBODY PLEASE NOTE: I REDUCED THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF SKYWRITINGS. BUT THE READINGS ARE **ALL** RELEVANT TO AN OVERALL UNDERSTANDING OF THE COURSE. SO, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT DO A SKYWRITING ON ALL OF THEM, AT LEAST FEED EACH READING YOU DO NOT READ TO CHATGPT AND ASK IT FOR A SUMMARY, SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE READING SAID — OTHERWISE YOU WILL NOT HAVE A COMPLETE GRASP OF THE COURSE TO INTEGRATE AND INTERCONNECT FOR THE FINAL EXAM.***
DeleteRachel, but Dennett does not think a complete “heterophenology” would leave anything out. (Is he right?) His heterophenomenology is part of the solution to the Easy Problem (EP) (T4). Does T4 leave something out?
It doesn’t sound like you are describing Dennett’s view, but the views of others he mentions. The Hard Problem (HP) is not the problem of describing feeling, or of explaining what it feels like to feel. It’s the problem of explaining (reverse-engineering) how and why sentient species (human and nonhuman animal) feel at all. Why is that problem “hard”? and why does solving the EP not solve the HP? (See the next reading.)
Lorena, “experience” is a WW. What we really mean is felt experience, in other words, feeling. Why do organisms not just do (or learn to do) what needs to be done, without feeling anything at all? We know the biological function of doing: what is the biological function of feeling? We also know the biological function of thinking. Thinking (cognition) could, for example, have been just computation (executing an algorithm). But it’s not. (Why not?) It feels like something to think: Why? Both seeing something and hallucinating feel like something: what for? And how? The HP is not about whether something you feel (“it’s hot in here”) is true or false but about why and how we feel anything at all. And what every sentient organism knows for sure (as Descartes’ Cogito/Sentio notes) is that they are feeling whatever they are feeling (while they are feeling).
In this paper, the author defends heterophenomenology, which is an empirical method that does not assume subjective experience is accurate when collecting data on cognition. He contrasts the third person scientific approach to studying cognition with the first person philosophical notion that there is an irreducible subjective experience to consciousness. He then concludes that these subjective experiences, upon which the foundation of firstperson science is built, are an illusion, and that heterophenomenology must use third-person methods. My favourite part of this paper was the author’s explanation of the heterophenomenological zombie twins, as it helped make the arguments in the paper more tangible.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your summary Jesse! It made it easier for me to follow the paper. It’s interesting how he wrote about learning to discredit illusions of our subjective experience. As we move forward with scientific research, we have to push past instincts that our subjective feelings know something more than what is concretely proven. Lorena also spoke to this in her comment.
DeleteThese two quotes summarize this idea well:
We’ve learned to dismiss other such intuitions in the past–the obstacles that so long prevented us from seeing the Earth as revolving around the sun.
You are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be happening in you.
Aside: It’s interesting that Dennett has put Searle on “Team B” (believing that there is something more to consciousness) as Searle argued for similar points to Dennett in the video from week 3: that consciousness is a natural, biological phenomenon, and that introspection is not a sure method of study.
Dennett makes me think about how we can really study the mind. He says first person feelings are not good for science because they can be wrong, but I feel they still matter. When people say what they feel, it shows something about how the mind works from inside. Maybe we should not ignore first person experience, but use it together with real data like brain activity or behavior. That way we can see both the feeling and the reason behind it. Dennett is right that science needs proof, but I think feelings can still give small clues about what the mind really is.
ReplyDeleteRena, I totally agree! Dennett's heterophenomenology sounds devoid of bias, which in it of itself shows they are not correctly approaching innate human cognitive processes and biases. The following quote struck me:
Delete"[...] but to these verbal reports must be added all the other manifestations of belief, conviction, expectation, fear,
loathing, disgust, etc., including any and all internal conditions (e.g. brain activities, hormonal diffusion, heart rate changes, etc.) detectable by objective means."
How de we add manifestations of belief and conviction, meshing them with the raw data? How and to what extent ought we include so-called objectively measured internal conditions? How is the 'objective' measure of LH secretion integrated to vocal measurements? Dennett's approach is not inherently wrong, as I do believe that big data approaches can be informative; however, information should be integrated as to yield more information (which was not fully discussed), not just integrated for the sake of it. I believe that approaching data from the assumption that subjective experiences are wrong and that their interpretation can be rescued by 'objective', 'scientific' measures is absurd: I wonder, who is doing the scientific measurement? Well, humans. All human-used machines designed to measure some parameter have bias built into them.
In my opinion, the fallacies in Dennett's heterophenomenology are the following:
1) Their scientific method applies solely to participants, not the investigator alike.
2) No overview or guideline on how big data should be apprehended.
3) The sacralization of big data; not all information is pertinent, and no measurement is ever objective.
Camille: I understand the issues that you have found with Dennett's heterophenomenology, and believe that there is a crucial problem in fallacy number 2.
DeleteIndeed, Dennet here argues that first-person accounts of consciousness are not sufficient for the scientific study of consciouscness. Human beings being unreliable, and often being wrong regarding their experiential beliefs (as illustrated by the change blindness experiment), it seems logical that first-person accounts of consciousness cannot be sufficient in establishing a scientific account of consciousness. He therefore argues that third-person "objective and scientific" decision making is essential in this process.
I agree with you that precision of the manner in which the different components of "big data" should be apprehended remains essential, particularly as it is not obvious to me that a firt-person account (auto-phenomenological description) ought to be given the same weight or relevance as data regarding physiological measures. These sources of information are profoundly different in kind: how could we treat them in the same manner? This need for complementarity is rooted in the fundamental differences between these sources of information: these differences must therefore be accounted for in data processing.
Dennett claims that measuring expressions of belief is enough to create the participant’s heterophenomenological world is maximally inclusive to study consciousness. He says that 1st-person studies are not useful for studying consciousness because you can be mislead, believe things that are false or be unaware of some beliefs even though they are conscious experiences. In contrast, Chalmers says that 1st-person access and data are essential for the the study of consciousness as it cannot be reduced to 3rd-person data. I agree with that because everything feels like something regardless of whether you are being mislead by your senses, unaware of a past trauma, seeing it or not able to say it verbally. Isn’t what consciousness is all about? I would be curious to know what Dennett thinks about consciousness in the cases of substance influence, Alzheimer’s disease, psychosis or even paralysis. He says he measures behaviourally, viscerally and verbally, but does it really tell everything?
ReplyDeleteThis paper covers Dennett’s argument that consciousness should be studied using third-person, objective, scientific methods, through a heterophenomenology framework. He critiques the idea of “first-person science”, labelling it a fantasy based on direct private introspection, since people’s own experiences can be misleading. Conscious experiences themselves should not be treated as primary data when people hold false beliefs about what they perceive. A crucial example is apparent motion or change blindness, where people misjudge what they see, supporting heterophenomenology's focus on collecting observable data about the subject remaining neutral about them being true or false. Although some philosophers challenge Dennett for avoiding subjective experience, he argues that his method captures everything that can be scientifically studied about consciousness.
ReplyDeleteHey Emily! Great job articulating Dennett’s position well! I think the change-blindness example you used was a good example of Dennett’s overall point about introspection as unreliable; but it also highlights a deeper issue – that regardless of whether we accurately report qualia or not, the question remains as to whether brain activity itself generates felt experiences (rather than just processing of neural patterns). I think Dennett may equate prediction with explanation (meaning if we are able to use neural correlates to predict subjective reports about feelings, then we have explained them) which kind of side steps the hard problem in its entirety. Dennett’s approach doesn’t really tell us how (or even why) those processes actually generate those subjective feelings…
DeleteEmily and Elle, I really enjoyed both of your points. What stood out to me in Dennett’s paper is how heterophenomenology gives us a way to study consciousness scientifically without treating our own introspections as automatically reliable. The examples of change blindness and apparent motion really stuck with me because they show how easily our “felt” experience can fool us. That makes Dennett’s neutral, third-person approach feel much more justified, since he’s basically saying we need to study what people report and do without assuming those reports always tell the full truth about what’s going on inside.
Delete“How does it work? We start with recorded raw data. Among these are the vocal sounds people make (what they say, in other words), but to these verbal reports must be added all the other manifestations of belief, conviction, expectation, fear, loathing, disgust, etc., including any and all internal conditions (e.g. brain activities, hormonal diffusion, heart rate changes, etc.) detectable by objective means.”
ReplyDeleteI find Dennett’s position that heterophenomenology is the only way to study consciousness to contain multiple fallacies. However, for the sake of keeping it concise, I’ll focus on one fallacy: his proposed method, which measures internal systems of cognition through external conditions, confuses correlation with causation. This method does not explain how the observed physiological or behavioural changes cause subjective experience, only that they happen alongside it. Treating the correlation between internal states and reports as an explanation risks collapsing the hard problem into data patterning. In essence, heterophenomenology might tell us when consciousness appears, but not why it feels like anything at all.
Maya, could you explicit where you understand that Dennet suggests physiological data points can be used to identify the cause of consciousness? I rather thought that he was suggesting that the medthodology should be so broad specifically because we do not know what causes consciousness, or what it is, so anything which happens alongside it must be considered as potentially yielding some information?
DeleteWhat I found most interesting is how Dennett’s heterophenomenology (his proposed method for studying consciousness) avoids relying on first-person claims by treating them as data about what seems to the subject, not as facts about what is actually happening. In other words, heterophenomenology is a third-person method that collects verbal reports and all other measurable data but stays completely neutral about whether these are true. Dennett thinks this is enough to solve the Easy Problem at the level of T4. But even a perfect T4 robot explains nothing about the Hard Problem, which is explaining how and why any of this doing is felt.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your take on Dennett’s neutrality. What really struck me in the article is how he insists heterophenomenology includes all third-person data, not just what people say, but every measurable reaction (blushes, brain activity, hesitations, etc.). He brings all of that into the “heterophenomenological world” without assuming any of it is true or false.
DeleteYou’re also right that this still doesn’t reach the Hard Problem. Dennett treats the sense that “something is missing”, what he calls the Zombic Hunch, as just another belief that needs explaining, not evidence of an inner property. But from a Type-B perspective, that move feels like it sidesteps the real question of why any of this functioning is felt. So heterophenomenology handles the Easy Problem well, but it doesn’t answer what you highlight: why doing is accompanied by experiencing.
Dennett seems to avoid smuggling in the very thing he thinks needs explaining. Anyone trying to explain the Hard Problem would probably feel unsatisfied with his work. Maybe the explanatory gap comes from human minds evolving to model the external world more precisely than they model their own internal processes. I think we should be asking why we experience feeling as something that requires explanation in the first place.
DeleteDennett’s heterophenomenology is not compatible with “1st person science”, which relies on introspection and takes data from introspection as truth. Heterophenomenology, on the other hand, takes any perceived experience as data, but not necessarily ‘true’ data - since the experience can either be ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect, since people can have false beliefs about their experiences. So heterophenomenology is incompatible with introspection as a scientific method, but what about empiricism? Empiricism attests that all knowledge is gained through sensory experience, but what if our senses are fallible? What ‘empirical’ data heterophenomenology accept?
ReplyDeleteDennett rejects the idea that there is a real Hard Problem, arguing that what Type-B theorists like Chalmers and Harnad treat as an unexplained inner essence is really just a misleading intuition. For him, consciousness is nothing beyond cognitive processes and the beliefs we form about them. From a Type-B stance, though, Dennett would seem to be addressing only the “easy problems,” because he denies the very phenomenon (the challenge of explaining how and why organisms feel at all, not just describing what feeling is like) that the Hard Problem is asking about. In that sense, a Type-B theorist would say Dennett never tackles the Hard Problem at all.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
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DeleteSannah, I agree that Dennett merely attempts to dissolve the Hard Problem of consciousness—that is, how and why living organisms feel—without making any real effort to explain it. He argues that Type-B theorists like Chalmers simply assume that “something is missing” from physical explanations, which leads them to treat consciousness as a fundamentally special, non-physical phenomenon. This supports Dennett's claim that the so-called Hard Problem is not a genuine scientific problem but rather an illusion created by misleading intuition. More specifically, how our strong feelings about private, ineffable inner experiences or “qualia” as philosophers call it, make us believe that this problem exists, when in fact, it does not.
While I agree that simply relying on feeling may not provide empirical evidence, I still find it difficult to dismiss the reality of feeling altogether. I also find Dennett’s claims somewhat controversial, as he critiques Chalmers for failing to directly address the Hard Problem while ultimately circling around the topic himself.
While I find Dennett’s paper interesting, I’m still unsure how the Other Minds Problem fits into his account. While I am aware that the Other Minds Problem is a philosophical idea, it is an important one to bring to the table when talking about the Hard Problem, and it is also one that Turing himself brought up (or "meant" to bring up when he brought up solipsism, according to Harnard).
ReplyDeleteDennett argues that the subject can report their own felt experience through verbal descriptions, so in that sense the Other Minds Problem doesn’t arise for the first-person perspective. But I’m struggling to see why a *third-person* mechanistic explanation of consciousness (i.e. heterophenomenology) wouldn’t still face the same challenge. From verbal reports, all we really have are descriptions *of* feelings/felt states, not direct access to those states themselves.
And, if psychology moved away from introspection because it wasn’t considered reliable, I’m unsure how heterophenomenology differs in practice. Is it due to the added components of heterophenomenology? I think the article is just harder for me to grasp.
Dennett avoids the Other Minds Problem by denying the very thing the problem targets: a private, ineffable layer of ‘felt experience’ (or qualia) that only the subject can access. For him, there is no hidden inner fact behind a person’s reports, the reports are the data, and all there is to know scientifically about experience lies in the publicly observable patterns of behavior, judgment, and neural activity. That’s why, in his view, heterophenomenology doesn’t face the same challenge as introspection as it doesn’t claim ‘privileged access to an inner thing’ but treats first-person reports as third-person evidence about how a system is organized. The Other Minds Problem only comes up if you think consciousness involves a special private property beyond what can be expressed or measured, Dennett rejects that idea, so the ‘problem’ goes away rather than being solved. I feel like this could sidestep and ignore the hard problem rather than addressing it.
DeleteThe main issue with using T3 to model human cognition is that it doesn’t address the hard problem. While some might believe because a T3 model is grounded in experience it can model our consciousness as a whole but this model fails to address how a subjective feeling experience is created. According to Dennett, the hard problem is not actually a problem that can be solved through science. His heterophenomenolgy says that science should treat people’s reports of experience as data about beliefs and not direct windows into their experiences. This can not explain how subjective feeling arises. So a T3 model could model all of cognition without explaining why things feel like anything.
ReplyDelete“Heterophenomenology is nothing but good old 3rd-person scientific method applied to the particular phenomena of human (and animal) consciousness… bringing the data of the first person into the fold of objective science.”
ReplyDeleteI think this quote captures Dennett’s whole strategy: he wants to treat people’s reports about their experiences the same way we treat any other scientific data. He isn’t denying that people feel things, he just says that science should treat those feelings like observable claims, not as private truths we automatically trust.
I like this idea because it keeps the study of consciousness grounded. Instead of assuming that introspection gives us special access to reality, Dennett brings everything “into the fold” of public evidence: what people say, how they act, and what their bodies do. That makes the method clear and testable.
At the same time, I’m not sure this solves everything. Even if we can capture all first-person reports in a scientific way, we still don’t explain why those reports come with a feeling behind them. Dennett’s method helps with the Easy Problem, explaining what organisms do but it doesn’t really touch the Hard Problem, which asks why any of this 3rd-person activity is accompanied by a 1st-person experience at all.
So heterophenomenology gives us a strong scientific framework, but it doesn’t remove the deeper mystery of why consciousness is felt instead of just done.
While much of the debate focuses on the "Zombic Hunch," I was most struck by Dennett’s comparison of inaccessible first-person facts to "inert historical facts". He writes that these are like the fact that "some of the gold in my teeth once belonged to Julius Caesar... no possible extension of science will ever be able to say which is the truth".
ReplyDeleteThis analogy seems to do the heavy lifting in dismissing the "B Team’s" insistence on irreducible qualia. It trivializes the "Hard Problem" by suggesting that "unknowable" facts aren't profound mysteries but that they are rather just informationally empty, like the history of a gold atom. If first-person data is truly inaccessible to third-person investigation, Dennett implies it is as scientifically irrelevant as Caesar’s dental history. It pushes me to ask: why do we value an "extra ingredient" in consciousness if, by definition, it makes no verifiable difference?
I see your point, but I’d push back a bit. Even if this first-person "extra ingredient" is inaccessible to third-person investigation, we still all experience it; that is, we know that consciousness feels like something from the inside. That alone makes it relevant, even if it doesn’t show up in causal explanations. Just because it’s hard to define or measure doesn’t mean it’s trivial, like Dennett implies. It is a real phenomenon that any scientific account of cognition has to reckon with and not something we can dismiss as informationally empty.
DeleteDennett argues that a complete Heterophenomenology, a full account of what people do, say, and report - would leave nothing out. But this only solves the Easy problem. It explains the functional mechanisms of perception, learning, memory and behaviour. What it does not explain is why these processes are felt rather than purely computed. A system could, in principle, perform all the same functions without having any experience at all.
ReplyDeletePTSD could make this gap obvious. We can describe all the mechanisms such as memory retrieval, threat detection, autonomic arousal, and still not explain why the traumatic memory is felt with such overwhelming emotional force. Two people could have the same behavioural triggers and neural circuitry, yet one experiences crippling flashbacks and the other does not. The “doing” is similar, what differs is the “feeling”, the lived presence of the memory.
Heterophenomenology can record the reports, but it is not the same as explaining why it is felt from the inside. That is why T4 still leaves something out. The HP is not about describing particular feelings, but about explaining how and why organisms feel anything al all, rather than functioning entirely unconsciously. Solving the Easy Problem gets a us a full model of cognition, but it does not tell us why cognition is accompanied by experience.
This reading, along with our class discussions, made me wonder about the relationship between the easy and the hard problems and the idea of degrees of freedom. How can we say that the easy problem uses all the degrees of freedom which prevents us from understanding the hard problem when we don't know the complete truth of the easy problem? Isn’t there a possibility that feelings have a strictly physiological explanation the same way that the easy problem supposedly does? My question is more why do we assume that they are two different problems when we haven’t completely explained either?
ReplyDeleteJulien, Here’s my reply. It was a little long, so instead of posting in the blog, I posted it here:
DeleteOn the “Easy Problem” (EP) vs. the “Hard Problem” (HP) of Cognitive Science
There’s also a follow-up here:
Exchange with ChatGPT On the “Easy” and “Hard” Problem of Cognitive Science.
Thank you Professor for this explanation, this helped a lot.
DeleteI now see that the hard problem isn’t about finding more causes, since even a complete causal explanation of what organisms do would still leave feeling unexplained. What I keep coming back to is this: if we have devoted so much empirical effort to solving the EP and explaining behaviour and function, and if feeling does not play a causal role in those explanations, then why does feeling matter so much conceptually?
In other words, once all the doing is explained, what makes feeling such an important remainder?
“We can come to see it, in the end, as a misleader, a roadblock to understanding”
ReplyDeleteWhat struck me is how quickly Dennett treats the “Zombic Hunch” as something to be explained away rather than evaluated. He frames it as a cognitive illusion—but how does he know it’s an illusion before the scientific explanation is given? If heterophenomenology stays strictly neutral, isn’t declaring the hunch misleading already a non-neutral assumption? I’m not sure his dismissal follows from the method he defends.
Dennett proposes that heterophenomenology, a method that combines both subjective (ex. verbal reports) and objective data (ex. facial expressions), can be used to study consciousness (aka feeling), while discrediting first-person science. However, because heterophenomenology is based in data that are merely correlates of feeling (i.e. phenomena that co-occur with feeling), without studying the feelings in themselves, it avoids the Hard Problem of consciousness/feeling altogether. Indeed, the Hard Problem is considered hard partly because feelings cannot be studied directly. As such, Dennett's method does not aim to explain how and why organisms feel, but rather proposes to study the manifestations of feeling through third-person science. However, it seems obvious that since feelings are not directly measurable, first-person science is the only way to study them, however “unscientific” the methods may seem to Dennett.
ReplyDeleteDennett’s defense of heterophenomenology fits comfortably within the T3, where explaining cognition means explaining all observable capacities—reports, behaviors, discriminations, and internal mechanisms. But this still leaves the real hard problem untouched. Even if cognitive science reverse-engineers a T4 model that is fully Turing indistinguishable from a human in every causal respect, that only exhausts the causal degrees of freedom. Nothing observable is left unexplained. Yet because of the Other Minds Problem, we still cannot know whether the T4 system feels. This unobservability is not itself the hard problem, physics tolerates unobservables like quarks when they are needed for causal explanation. The deeper issue is that the easy problem already explains all observable functions without needing to posit feeling at all. Feeling plays no identifiable causal role in the model. So even after complete T4 indistinguishability, the existence of feeling remains underdetermined, but unlike physics, what remains unexplained is not optional: we know feeling exists from our own case. Dennett tries to dissolve this gap, but the explanatory hole persists precisely because the causal story never requires subjective experience to do any work.
ReplyDelete“It still seems that the sun goes round the earth, and it still seems that a living thing has some extra spark, some extra ingredient that sets it apart from all non-living stuff, but we’ve learned not to credit those intuitions.”
ReplyDeleteDennett treats qualia as a likely illusion, arguing that if science cannot measure it and people cannot define it consistently, then the intuition of an “extra ingredient” is probably misleading. I disagree. Even Dennett would likely admit to experiencing the same intuition himself, which suggests it cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant. Heterophenomenology captures only correlates of consciousness, behavioral or physiological, but never consciousness itself. To me, the variability of how qualia is defined does not invalidate it as a philosophical concept; it remains a meaningful hunch about the human condition. In my opinion that points less to irrelevance than to science’s limits in touching consciousness. This does not mean that first-person science is infallible, but the idea of infallibility is itself irrelevant to why it is that it feels like something to be conscious, regardless of the content of the experience.
I'm wondering how a reconfiguring of the first and third person would affect Dennett's argument for heterophenomenology. There are many different ways of and contemporary debates around things such as self porosity etc. that consider how even a perspective considered to be first person may contain multiple selves and selves across time. An example that came up in class is in reading and writing. When I write this skywriting and read it a week from now for the final, my future reading self is now the third person for what my current first person self is and my thoughts will likely have changed. Another lense how a typical self may contain a multitude of selves. When I write this skywriting, my thinking is in conversation with a voice of Dr. Harnad and potential replies from other classmates which may be shaped by my real third person interactions with what they say.
ReplyDeleteExpanding on a specific configuration of personhood (which we don't have a very neat one of yet it seems) could muddy Dennett's argument but is a nuance worth exploring I think in order to have a tool for considering what people say about their experience as data while allowing people to maintain sovereignty of their experience.
I hate to be such a skeptic, but the more I think about it, the more the flaws in both the heterophenomenological approach and the Chalmers-style (Group B) approach seem impossible to reconcile. It feels obvious that neither offers a satisfactory path to understanding consciousness. Dennett, for instance, ends up conflating what consciousness is with how science happens to be equipped to study it. By broadening the concept to include behavior, reports, and brain activity, he effectively redefines consciousness into something convenient for third-person investigation, but arguably misses the phenomenon itself. Chalmers, meanwhile, situates consciousness squarely in the realm of qualia - an aspect of experience that is, by definition, excluded from scientific methods. His view preserves the felt essence of consciousness but makes it impossible to study empirically.
ReplyDeleteThese two schools of thought are playing two different games, and I think it's unlikely that either will solve the explanatory gap. Dennet tries to solve consciousness by redefining and tweaking it to fit scientific norms, while Chalmers is purposely excluding science to preserve the essence of sentence (a quality immeasurable by science). Come to think of it, the explanatory gap (brain activity giving rise to feeling) is reflected in these two thinkers themselves. Dennett hones in on the 'brain activity' part, while Chalmers focuses on the 'feeling' part. Thus, neither bridge the gap.
I'm starting to think of the exploration of consciousness like a fork in the road. Either you converge to team A, or team B, neither of which explain the space between the two. I don't think this necessary entails that the problem is unsolvable, though I do believe we aren't on the right track.
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ReplyDeleteDennett argues that “first-person science” is a fantasy because any serious study of consciousness must rely on third-person, heterophenomenological data. But this seems too quick. Reducing subjective experience to reports + brain states risks dismissing exactly what’s puzzling about consciousness. His “Zombic Hunch” explanation feels like explaining away rather than explaining. Maybe Chalmers overstates the Hard Problem, but Dennett sometimes understates it; treating intuition as illusion without proving it. We need more than neutrality; we need a theory that actually bridges experience and mechanism.
ReplyDelete“How and why do organisms that feel, feel?”
ReplyDeleteWhat I find most interesting in the reading is the paradoxical nature of the Hard Problem. This question divides cognitive scientists between two groups, the thinkers like Dennett (who view the problem as an illusion) and people like Chalmers, (who insist it is a real unsolved challenge).
Chalmers’ side argues that the Turing Test neglects subjective experience, which Chalmers insists he knows exists through direct evidence (the Zombic Hunch).
The reason the HP is so hard is because the EP focuses on explaining and reverse-engineering cognitive capacities to the point where they are Turing-indistinguishable from a human. Once the causal explanation for observable behaviour is complete, it accounts for everything that can be observed, without having to hypothesise feeling. This leaves explanatory uncertainty, a form of underdetermination, regarding subjective experience. Dennett addresses this by using heterophenomenology, which analyses verbal reports and behaviours as evidence of beliefs about feeling, sidestepping the HOW and WHy of feeling.
Dennett's main point in this paper is that consciousness can be studied through heterophenomenology, a fully third person method that includes subjective reports but doesn't treat them as facts. He says that this method is a pathway from "objective physical science and its insistence on third person POV, to a method of phenomenological description that can do justice to the most private ineffable subjective experiences.." He talks about how introspection can mislead us because people can both believe experiences they never had but they can also can miss experiences that influence their behaviour but they might've not consciously registered. I thought his use of change blindness especially convincing. If someone's qualia can radically shift without the person noticing, then first person experiences alone can't and shouldn't ground a science. Dennett's critiques of Chalmers also made sense adressing the hard problem that if a zombie duplicate were to behave identically then subjective direct evidence cannot explain anything.
ReplyDelete“Heterophenomenology must be leaving something out. That’s the ubiquitous Zombic Hunch.”
ReplyDeleteDennett admits one of peoples’ worries about heterophenomenology is dismissing others’ subjective experiences, but states that those experiences are a ‘zombic hunch’ and to treat them effectively as illusions because self reports are not infallible. However, dismissing the zombie hunch as a psychological illusion is not enough because it sweeps the hard problem under the rug. Cartesian certainty states that we can’t doubt what we are feeling right now; so even if we eventually solve, with heterophenomenology, the easy problem by reverse engineering human cognitive capacities, we still wouldn’t know where to begin solving the hard problem for why feeling arises out of these biological material processes because we still wouldn’t know why they’re felt from the inside rather than carried out unconsciously.
The core strength of Dennett’s heterophenomenology is its insistence on total scientific neutrality. Instead of accepting subjective reports, “first-person data”, as fact, the method approaches them strictly from a third-person perspective. All objective data, ranging from verbal reports to physiological responses and brain activity, are collected. The crucial distinction for achieving neutrality is that the subject’s beliefs about their own conscious states are bracketed. This means researchers must explain the existence or cause of those beliefs rather than simply stipulating their truth.
ReplyDeleteThis rigorous neutrality is necessary because the first-person perspective is fallible, producing "failures of overlap". For instance, individuals may have false positive beliefs, such as the conviction that their peripheral vision is always detailed, which is demonstrably untrue. By only focusing on establishing how things seem to the subject without validating the objective truth of the experience, heterophenomenology avoids the assumption of first-person infallibility, making it a consistent methodology for natural science.
Dennett’s paper argues against the Hard Problem and the idea that there is an aspect of consciousness only available to the sentient individual (which he claims he can “leap” over because the Turing test provided a means by which to evaluate consciousness as an engineering problem and because reports of subjective experience are already third-person data). He believes that heterophenomenology is the adequate method to understanding cognition (why we do what we do, a.k.a, The Easy Problem) and there is nothing left to account for. However, given what we’ve learned so far, I would argue that his argument falls short. Let’s say that we have finally built a T4-passing robot capable not only of sensorimotor interaction and all human cognitive processes, but also has some factor correlated with feeling. That still wouldn’t give a causal explanation for why and how organisms feel. Even then, we would’ve used every possible avenue/degree of freedom to solve The Easy problem. This philosophy is reminiscent of our discussion of Thomas Nagel’s “What it’s like to be a bat” wherein he explains how we can try and imagine what it would be like to use echolocation as a bat from a human perspective (as organisms wired to perceive through vision mainly), but that mental experience is not equivalent to the subjective experience of a bat being a bat. Thus, it does not make sense for “first-person science” to be a fantasy because it is so fundamentally involved in the conscious experience and cannot be accessible to anybody else but the person experiencing.
ReplyDeleteDennett suggests we are essentially complex biological machines, stating "we are robots made of robots", trillions of mindless cells working together to create a conscious agent. Instead of trusting gut intuitions about "qualia," he proposes "heterophenomenology," a method that treats internal experiences as interpreted data rather than indubitable facts.
ReplyDeleteThis, for Computation, frames the mind as an engineering problem to be solved. It also redefines Communication, viewing our verbal reports as raw "texts" that requires scientific verification. Ultimately, this implies our "inner life" is a byproduct of neural Categorization. If we cannot distinguish our experience from a "zombie" report, is consciousness just a "grand illusion"? I think that what we call "self" is just a biological user interface.
even if we accept that we are “robots made of robots,” and even if the self is an interface rather than a substance, that still leaves the hard question untouched: why does this interface feel like something from the inside? A zombie could have the same interface, generate the same texts, pass the same tests. Harnad’s point in his response is precisely that calling feeling an illusion doesn’t make it go away because an illusion itself is something that is felt.
DeleteI think an interesting part of the paper is that heterophenomenology is unfalsifiable. This means that while one can collect a lot of information from reports and brains scans and so on, I have a hard time seeing how this can provide any information leading to testable and scientific hypothesis. And if this is not the goal, I am suspicious that this type of inquity leads to any pertinent information outside of heterophenomenology itself.
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