QuestionsIs the mind the brain?There are no qualia: Dennett's intuition pumps
Is the mind the brain?The question is badly put

There are no qualia: Dennett's intuition pumps

Against qualia

Daniel Dennett 1942 · 2024There is nothing magic about consciousness: it is the brain at work, which science can explain.
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What it claims

Nothing corresponds to what philosophers call "qualia": in their place there are relational, public properties, practically hard to describe, which we pick out thanks to our private detectors (private only in the sense of idiosyncratic). There are no qualia in the philosophers' sense.

Why

Thought experiments show that no property of experience can be both intrinsic and directly known.

The same idea through history
Ludwig Wittgenstein1953The beetle in the box: what is in the box, if it is a private object, plays no role in language. Dennett cites it and wants to go further.
Daniel Dennett1988Qualia in the philosophers' sense do not exist; what exists are public properties and judgements.
In short

"There are no qualia: Dennett's intuition pumps" is an argument by Daniel Dennett ("Quining Qualia", 1988; Consciousness Explained, 1991, 1988) on the question "Is the mind the brain?" (answer: the question is badly put). Its claim: Nothing corresponds to what philosophers call "qualia": in their place there are relational, public properties, practically hard to describe, which we pick out thanks to our private detectors (private only in the sense of idiosyncratic). There are no qualia in the philosophers' sense. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 2 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

"Quining Qualia", 1988; Consciousness Explained, 1991
Valid

When you taste coffee, there is a certain flavour you feel. Many philosophers call such lived qualities of red, of coffee, of pain "qualia", and think they escape the science of the brain: you could know everything about neurons and still not have the flavour. Daniel Dennett answers that the word "qualia", as philosophers use it, refers to nothing. He does not deny that you feel something; he denies that there are properties that are at once indescribable, intrinsic, private and directly known. If that is right, the question "does the brain explain the mind?" is badly posed, because it assumes those qualia.

P1In the philosophers' sense, qualia are supposed to be properties of a person's mental states that are (1) ineffable, (2) intrinsic, (3) private and (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.
P2The "intuition pumps" show that no property of experience can be both intrinsic and directly known with authority by the one who has it. Example: Chase and Sanborn have tasted the same coffee for six years; Chase says the flavour has not changed but he no longer likes it, Sanborn says it has changed. Both can compare only with memory: nothing, from the inside, tells a flavour that changed from a judgement that changed.
So nothing corresponds to what philosophers call "qualia": in their place there are relational, public properties, practically hard to describe, which we pick out thanks to our private detectors (private only in the sense of idiosyncratic). There are no qualia in the philosophers' sense.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Valid: if qualia must be intrinsic and directly known (P1), and if nothing can be both (P2), then there are no qualia. Dennett warns that he is not giving a formal argument: he says he wants to destroy an intuitive idea, and that the right tools for this are "intuition pumps", not formal arguments. Our reconstruction makes explicit the form we think his reasoning takes; it is not Dennett's text.
Analogy. A blind taste test: you say this soda has always tasted the same to you. But how do you know? You compare with a memory, and your memory may have changed along with your taste. Nothing lets you separate, from the inside, "the taste changed" from "my judgement changed".

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

David Chalmers ("Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness") 1995 · attacks the conclusion

Chalmers lists Dennett among those who take the line of "denying the phenomenon": once the functions are explained (access, verbal report), no "experience" would remain to be explained. For him this is untenable: experience is "the most central and manifest aspect" of our mental lives, and it is "undeniable" that some organisms are subjects of experience.

Dennett replies
Dennett ("Quining Qualia", 1988, before Chalmers) Dennett's reply: I do not deny experience
Dennett answers in advance: everything real has properties, and since he does not deny the reality of conscious experience, he grants that conscious experience has properties. What he refuses is that they be ineffable, intrinsic, private and directly known.
The debate goes on (our summary) Chalmers answers that the problem is precisely that there is "something it is like" to be in a state, and that this fact is not explained by functional or relational properties. For him, Dennett keeps the word "experience" but removes what was problematic about it. This idea of "something it is like" comes from Thomas Nagel (1974, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?"), the classic reference for the idea Dennett contests. The disagreement is about what counts as "explaining".
John Searle (reply to Dennett, New York Review of Books) 1995 · attacks premise 2

Searle argues that as far as the existence of conscious states is concerned, one cannot distinguish appearance from reality, "because the existence of the appearance is the reality in question". If it consciously seems to me that I am in pain, then I am. The possibility of error about one's own states, which the Chase and Sanborn example seems to use, therefore does not arise here.

Dennett replies
Dennett (letter to the New York Review of Books) Dennett's reply: a third-person science of consciousness
Dennett answers that he shows how an objective science of consciousness is possible after all, and that his method (which he calls heterophenomenology) is the one every scientist of consciousness uses, whereas the alternative, Searle's "first-person" approach, leads to paradox. He holds the idea of "intrinsic" content to be the intuition to bring down.
The debate goes on (our summary) Searle thinks Dennett denies what is obvious; Dennett thinks Searle defends "intuitions" rather than a theory. The debate remained open: the "intuition" Dennett wants to bring down is exactly the one Searle presents as a fact. Our source for Searle is the exchange published in the New York Review of Books; he took up his criticisms again in The Mystery of Consciousness (1997), which we could not read.
Frank Jackson ("Epiphenomenal Qualia") 1982 · attacks the conclusion

Jackson imagines Mary, a scientist who knows everything about the physics of colour vision but has never seen a colour. When she sees red for the first time, she learns something new. So there are facts about experience (what red is like) that are not physical facts, and qualia exist.

no reply
Dennett did reply, but that text is not yet in our corpus.
The debate goes on (our summary) Dennett discusses the Mary case in Consciousness Explained (1991, ch. 12, "Qualia Disqualified"), but we have not read that passage and do not summarise it. The Mary case has its own article on this site, written by another batch.
What today's voices say
Defend it
Daniel DennettHis own argument against qualia. 'Do qualia exist? No. Qualia is a philosopher's term of art.'
Criticize it
Donald HoffmanHe answers illusionists (Dennett, Frankish, Graziano) that consciousness does not seem to him an illusion, and that if it is, they owe a scientific account of the illusion.