ABSTRACT

Dennett’s project is to explain consciousness without explaining phenomenal consciousness. The explanation will be couched entirely in the language of content, representation and intentionality. But, says Dennett, we need not draw any direct explanation of phenomenal consciousness from these resources because there is no such thing as phenomenal consciousness! Crudely speaking, we need only explain why people think there is phenomenal consciousness. It looks like the generation problem can be dodged, and consigned to the dustbin of misbegotten, purely philosophical pseudo-problems (hence Dennett aims to dissolve rather than solve the problem of consciousness). The first task is to undermine our conception of phenomenal consciousness. Dennett’s attack is specifically directed at the notion of qualia: the ‘what it is like’ to experience something, the colours of the sunset, a vivid visual memory of your mother’s face, the sound of an orchestra playing in your dreams. Dennett argues that the very idea of qualia is subtly confused and incoherent. His approach is to display a variety of ingenious thought experiments which are supposed to reveal the incoherence lurking within the concept of qualia. The conclusions drawn from the thought experiments depend, however, upon certain exotic philosophical principles, especially verificationism (the doctrine affirming that where one can’t tell the truth about something, there is no truth to tell). It is not clear that the cases Dennett considers really suffer from serious verificationist problems; worse, it seems that Dennett’s verificationism is a good deal less plausible than is an innocuous conception of qualia sufficient to underwrite the idea of phenomenal consciousness.