Phi of Mind: Paper Two In this paper, four important features of Qualia will be made explicit. From these, we will examine two specific features of qualia (privacy and immediate apprehensibility) which Dennett attempts to debunk in his article, Quining Qualia. His reasoning – in the form of intuition pumps – will be critiqued, and a rejection formulated.
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Qualia are traditionally held to possess four characteristics which make them unique. They are ineffable, intrinsic, private, and immediately apprehensible within consciousness. Listing these attributes is all well and good, but what are they? Ineffability refers to the incommunicability of qualia. Attempting to use language to capture qualia seems to miss part of the experience, or…show more content… The privacy we speak of is qualia’s internal nature. Since they are ineffable, and internal to our process of consciousness, other people cannot experience our exact qualia. An example: one could possibly find neurological states which are perfectly correlated with certain forms of qualia – pain and C fibers, perhaps – but these states are not the qualia themselves. While we can observe someone and deduce they are experiencing a certain kind of qualia, we cannot know what it is like for them to have the qualia. Furthermore, the ineffability of qualia means that they cannot be communicated by linguistic means either. The only way to experience qualia for X is –frustratingly enough – to experience qualia while being X. Our final attribute of qualia is immediate apprehensibility: by this, we simply mean that qualia are not something that requires analytic thought to crack open, or outside psychological knowledge to really understand. Pain is pain, it hurts. Pleasure is pleasure, it pleases. Fear is fear, it scares us. When you smell a rose, it’s a rose-smell. It is not possible to ‘misunderstand’ qualia. It’s an experience of something, it cannot be…show more content… (The similarities between 5 and 6 allow them to be discussed as a single argument in two halves.) In pump 5, Dennett brings our attention to a concept known as qualia inversion. What would happen if we were to wake up and find that our color-qualia were inverted? One would assume they would very easily notice if the sun appeared blue to them, and the sky yellow. But is this a clear cut case of qualia-change, or something more sinister? In pump 6, Dennett reveals the rest of his example: our qualia were inverted due to the antics of a mad neurosurgeon. But how did he (or she) accomplish this bit of dastardly do-baddery? Dennett advances two possible cases, with identical results and very different consequences for our position on qualia. In possibility one, the neurosurgeon flips our color channels for current qualia, causing our new experiences to be inverted. In possibility two, this same neurosurgeon could have altered our memory of past qualia in order to achieve the same effect – while keeping our external qualia identical
