Is Daniel Dennett's argument against qualia valid?

Question

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.

Addendum to the question, addded by dcleve:

Here is the link for the book online: https://scilib-biology.narod.ru/Dennett/CE/index.html

See chapter 12, section 4, page 389

Here is the claim Dennett makes:

When you say “This is my quale,” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions. This does provide support, however, for the shockingly “verificationist” or “positivistic” view that the very idea of inverted qualia is nonsense — and hence that the very idea of qualia is nonsense.

This is a very similar argument to that he made in Quining Qualia -- which is that it is just the behaviorist functions and dispositions we care about, and if we try to characterize a "something more" happening solely inside our heads, we end up thoroughly confused and unclear. So one can reasonably treat "something more" as irrelevant, and effectively non-existent.

Note I had to spell this argument out myself. This is because Dennett's text engages in narratives, rather than clear or explicit arguments. This is a common critique of the book, that it is more of a set of intuition pumps than it is a reasoned argument for his Delusionism view of consciousness.

Answer 1

Is Dennett's argument "valid?"

One of the peculiar features of Consciousness Explained is that in it, Dennett has almost no arguments. Instead, he is using intuition pumps to try to induce his readers to adopt his assumption set. Near the end of the book, he admits that he wrote it based on the core assumption set of Julian Jaynes, whose "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" assumes that human brains can "run" different operating systems, and that about 5000 years ago, the "bicameral mind" operating system was spontaneously replaced by our "conscious mind" operating system, in a runaway memetic infection event. Through intuition pumps, Dennett he attempted to create a similar runaway memetic infection event that would reboot his reader's minds, such that they would no longer have the delusion of being conscious.

The section you cite involves a suite of intuition pumps which seek to make the basic premise of behaviorism -- that what we think inside our heads is irrelevant to what our behavior is -- more palatable to his readers. Explicitly, he argues that qualia just ARE mental processing, and one can just characterize our behavior "dispositions" and do away with any need for thinking in qualia language.

His examples rely heavily upon three presumptions:

1. Causal closure of the physical, such that neurons or functions (he hedges his bet a bit on purely reductive physicalism, because functions are emergent) are the only things that can cause behavior, and
2. Identity of consciousness/experience with some physical feature (again, functions are allowed, so at least some degree of emergent physicalism)
3. Dismissal of parallel causes -- if neurons or functions can explain an event, discussion of a parallel mental/qualia path is causally irrelevant

Using these three assumptions, he then seeks to persuade his readers of the consequent irrelevance of qualia and consciousness.

In philosophy, there are multitudes of possible reasonably coherent worldview options, and Dennett's is a possible one.

His thought problems with evil surgeons and logic paths from photo-receptor to color qualia are not actually arguments, they are efforts to guide his reader's intuition to make his particular worldview more intellectually satisfying to them. They are perfectly acceptable persuasive tools, which is as close as it comes to saying "yes, they are as valid as any other persuasion is."

His reasoning, from 1-3 to his behaviorist conclusion, actually convinced the a majority of philosophers of the virtue of behaviorism for nearly a half century in the mid 20th century, so it is actually a pretty persuasive argument.

However, his admitted global objective of infecting his readers with a memetic mind virus to brainwash them by rewriting their operating systems -- I consider that to be a pretty vile goal in writing a book.

What are the counter arguments

Well prior to the behaviorist interlude, basically all philosophers considered phenomenal experience to be our core data about the world -- the only thing we really knew to be true. This was basically philosophic consensus for several centuries before the 1920s, and it is near consensus again today. Behaviorists/Delusionists/illusionists/eliminative materialists constitute only 4.5% of philosophers today, per the 2020 philosophers survey. And Jaegwon Kim considers contemporary philosophers to be extremely embarrassed about that behaviorist half-century. Despite the brief period of persuasion -- most philosophers consider our internal experience to be so intuitively convincingly real, that whatever intuition pumps Dennett deploys, they are not working.

In addition to wholesale rejection by his peers, Dennett has to deal with the catastrophic failure of behaviorism as a theory in psychology. "Theory of Mind" is SO useful, that babies start developing it within the first several months of life. Behaviorism, that treats minds as irrelevant, proved to be unsurprisingly terrible when applied to psychology.

Of particular note is that some of our best recent science refutes behaviorism. Examples:

• The psychology that replaced behaviorism was cognitive psychology, whose core premise is that the mind is causal. The fruitfulness of this method has spawned another science, Cognitive Science, whose focus is on how we do this causal mental processing.
• one of our best recent set of psych experiments on decision making -- those detailed by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, has our consciousness, system 2, acting as a 2nd guess checker on our unconscious decision making done by system 1.
• Neuroscience has characterized the role of consciousness, vs. system 1 unconscious processing, as that of a CEO, monitoring the unconscious processes. And Qualia are the way the unconscious processes communicate with the conscious CEO. This model is detailed by David Eagleman in Incognito.

Dennett himself, in one section of Consciousness Explained, also had to address the way our minds act as von-Neuman/Turing machines, despite being wired completely differently. Our brains are wired a massively parallel neural nets, with no central processor unit, no linear processing etc. Our computers are designed like we reason, as linear von Neuman machines. To address this tremendous disconnect between wiring and brain function, Dennett postulates that we "run a virtual Von-Neumann machine on our analog hardware". But running programs and having virtual machines in our heads -- is not DISPOSITONS (analog neural nets DO develop dispositions). It is instead pretty explicitly "theory of mind" "in our heads" being "causal", and Dennett admitting all of this to be “virtual” is Dennett himself adopting a causal dualism that he repeatedly savages among his peers.

So, between his peers being convinced by the experience of experience, the utility of theory of mind, the advances in science demonstrating the reality and causal nature of both qualia and consciousness, and Dennett himself not even being able to build a behaviorist model and having to resort to an emergent causal dualism -- Dennett's persuasive advocacy -- has run into a multitude of falsifying test cases.

Answer 2

The question is ill-formed through no fault of your own.

Unless he changed his mind between writing Quining Qualia in '88 and Consciousness Explained in '91 (which I haven't read), Dennett just denies the epistemological specialness of conscious experiences and the conceptual coherency of qualia as a philosophical term of art.

My claim, then, is not just that the various technical or theoretical concepts of qualia are vague or equivocal, but that the source concept, the "pretheoretical" notion of which the former are presumed to be refinements, is so thoroughly confused that even if we undertook to salvage some "lowest common denominator" from the theoreticians' proposals, any acceptable version would have to be so radically unlike the ill-formed notions that are commonly appealed to that it would be tactically obtuse - not to say Pickwickian - to cling to the term [qualia]. (Dennett, Quining Qualia, 1988)

Normally a person who claims that X does not exist means that X refers to a particular well-defined concept and that concept has no referent in reality. Dennett's meaning has nothing to do with that. He is making the contrary claim that qualia does not refer to any particular well-defined concept, and he makes the tactically obtuse - not to say deliberately obfuscating - decision to use the phrase "there simply are no qualia at all" to represent that claim.

Answer 3

The question cannot be whether qualia exist or not. This question can only be answered by each of us, for ourselves, independently of each other, unless we could all become convinced that we all have the same sort of subjective experience, which seems extremely unlikely.

The only reasonable question is that of the meaningfulness of the word 'qualia'. To me, the word 'qualia' is meaningful, and it seems to be meaningful to many, perhaps most people. I woud say that a quale is just the subjective quality of what we experience subjectively. I am open to the idea that some people just do not have subjective experience, or that their subjective experience does not involve qualia. If so, I am clearly not going to be able to convince them that the word 'qualia', as I just defined it, is meaningful, i.e., that qualia exist. We can imagine that truly intelligent AI machines could arrive at the conclusion, or the opinion, that qualia do not exist. If a toaster could give its opinion, it is probable that it would agree that qualia do not exist. Perfectly rational entities only necessarily arrive at the same conclusion if they can start from the same premises.

Still, any pretense to be able to conclude rationally that qualia do not exist is just absurd. You are not in my mind. You do not know what is there. To claim that I do not have qualia is as absurd as claiming that I cannot imagine the Unicorn.