David Baßler’s commentary identifies five unasked questions in my work, and provides excellent answers to them. His explanation of the gradual evolution of higher-order intentionality via a Bayesian account leads to an explanation of the persistence of our deluded belief in qualia

Dennett, Daniel C.

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How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so muchA Reply to David H. BaßlerDaniel C. DennettDavid Baßler’s  commentary identifies  five unasked questions in my work,  andprovides excellent answers to them. His explanation of the gradual evolution ofhigher-order intentionality via a Bayesian account leads to an explanation of thepersistence of our deluded belief in qualia. KeywordsBelief in belief | Dispositions | Intentional systems | QualiaAuthorDaniel C. Dennettdaniel.dennett@tufts.edu   Tufts UniversityMedford, MA, U.S.A.CommentatorDavid H. Baßlerdavidhbassler@gmail.com   Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, GermanyEditorsThomas Metzingermetzinger@uni-mainz.de   Johannes Gutenberg-UniversitätMainz, GermanyJennifer M. Windtjennifer.windt@monash.edu   Monash UniversityMelbourne, AustraliaDavid Baßler’s commentary is a model of con-structive criticism, not only pointing to weak-nesses  but  offering  persuasive  repairs.  I  havejust two points of minor correction to offer be-fore turning to my understanding of his inter-esting  proposals  for  extensions  to  my  view,which I am inclined to adopt. First,  then, the quibbles.  I  am happy tosee him endorsing my frequent tactic of askingnot how to explain x but rather asking how toexplain why we believe in  x  in the first place,but I think that this is a procrustean bed onwhich to stretch my concept of intentional sys-tems. In  Dennett (1971) I was indeed offeringan account of intentionality that was demoting,in that intentionality was not seen as a featurethat sundered the universe into the mental andphysical (as Brentano and others had claimed),but I don’t like to think of it as dismissing in-tentionality as  a  real  phenomenon—though ofcourse  many  have  interpreted  me  that  way.Dennett (1991)  tried  to  correct  that  miscon-strual,  showing that  the  phenomena of  inten-tionality are real in their own way—any beingsthat don’t  discover these patterns are missingsomething important in the world. That aside, IDennett, D. C. (2015). How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so much - A Reply to David H. Baßler.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570665 1 | 5www.open-mind.netlove the use he makes of Hume on miracles tointroduce  his  treatment  of  our  minds  as  wit-nesses, just not very good witnesses; their testi-mony  can  be  explained  in  ways  that  do  notgrant the truth of some of their most cherishedclaims. As he puts it, the assumption of phe-nomenal consciousness “is deeply misleading be-cause  it  makes  us  look for  the wrong things,namely,  the objects  our judgments are about,rather  than  the  causes  of  these  judgments,which  are  nothing  like  these  objects”  (Baßlerthis collection, p. 2).My  other  quibble  is  a  similar  elision  Iwant to resist. He says: “Large parts of Break-ing the Spell  are dedicated to making under-standable  how  ‘belief  in  belief’  could  haveevolved over the centuries,  beginning long be-fore the appearance of any religion” (Baßler thiscollection, p. 4). This misidentifies higher orderbelief, beliefs about beliefs, with belief in belief.The former did indeed evolve gradually over theeons, and I find Baßler’s “just so story” aboutthis  gradual  process  enticing  indeed,  and willhave more to say about it below, but belief inbelief  is  a  much  younger  (and  almost  alwayspernicious)  phenomenon,  which  involves  thedeeply confused judgment that it is morally ob-ligatory to try to get yourself to believe tradi-tional nonsense when you know better. “If youdon’t believe in God, you are immoral. There-fore you must strive to believe in God. Belief inGod is a good thing to inculcate in our childrenand in ourselves.” Belief in belief didn’t arriveon  the  human  scene  until  the  proto-religions(which originally had no need for the concept)hit upon this obligation as a way of protectingtheir hegemony against the lures of competingdogmas. Some proto-religions were blithely ecu-menical, adopting the gods and demons of theirneighbors’  creeds  as  just  another  bit  of  loreabout  the  big  wide  world,  but  this  credulitycould not long stand in the face of market com-petition and growing common knowledge aboutthe  objective  world.  Since  many—probablymost—people in the world now see through atleast most of the nonsense, their persistent be-lief in belief is now a deplorable anachronism, asystematic  source  of  hypocrisy.  (A  delightfulcartoon in a recent New Yorker perfectly cap-tures this folly. Two armies confront each other,flying  identical  banners;  one  mounted warriorsays  “There  can  be  no  peace  until  they  re-nounce their Rabbit God and accept our DuckGod.”)As I say, these are quibbles I have to getoff my chest. Now to Baßler’s substantive pro-posals.  He  organizes  his  commentary  aroundfive questions he says I haven’t properly asked,and he has answers to all of them. He’s rightthat these are gaps in my account. (1) Why dowe need to monitor our dispositions? (2) How isself-monitoring accomplished? (3) How did thisself-monitoring evolve in a gradual  fashion? (4)Why  do  we  misidentify  our  dispositions?  (5)Why are we so attached to the idea of qualia? His answers are constructed by taking on,for the sake of argument, my Intentional Sys-tems Theory, and he gets it right, in all regards.Intentional Systems Theory (IST) presupposes,tactically, that any entity treated as an inten-tional system “is optimally designed to achievecertain goals. If there are divergences from theoptimal path, one can, in a lot of cases, correctfor this by introducing abstract entities or falsebeliefs.” IST is, as I  say, a competence modelthat  leaves  implementation  or  performancequestions unaddressed.1Then  comes  Baßler’s  major  novelty:  theidea  of  an  intermediate  competence  betweenmere  first-order  intentional  systems—whichhave no beliefs about beliefs (their own or oth-ers’)—and  full-fledged  second-or-higher-orderintentional systems—which can iterate the be-lief context. Such entities he calls (what else?)1.5th order intentional systems (shades of DavidMarr’s  1982 two-and-a-half-D sketch!). This isproposed to answer his first and second ques-tions with a plausible and in principle testableevolutionary  hypothesis.  A  system  with  only1.5th order intentionality “is able to ascribe de-sires  only  in  a  very  particular  and  concrete1 In this regard it is strikingly similar to the free energy principle aspresented by  Hohwy (this collection); both use the assumption ofbiofunctional optimizing as an interpretive lever to make sense of themyriad complexities of  the brain,  assigning to the brain a funda-mental task of acquiring accurate anticipations of the relevant causesin the organism’s world. I have not yet been able to assess the costsand benefits of these two different ways of thinking of brains as fu-ture-producer:  both are  abstract,  both court  triviality  if  misused.This is a good topic for future work.Dennett, D. C. (2015). How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so much - A Reply to David H. Baßler.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570665 2 | 5www.open-mind.netmanner, i.e., actions that the object in questionwants to perform with certain particular exist-ing objects, that the system itself [the ascriber]knows about” (Baßler this collection, p. 6). Heis wise to choose basic desires (for food, matingopportunities, safety, . .  .  ) as the intentionalstates ascribed in this precursor mentality, sincethey are so readily “observable” in the immedi-ate behavior of the object, giving our pioneermind-reader a quick confirmation that  it’s  onthe  right  track,  a  small,  gradual  step  for  aBayesian brain. Now what selection pressures would favorsuch systems evolving gradually from mere first-order systems? To the primitive first-order sys-tems, “the behavior of their conspecifics is un-explained noise to them.” But then they makesome  simple  discoveries.  When  they  see  anapple tree,  they approach it,  and so do theirconspecifics. If they see a predator, they run, asdo their kin. “One might indeed say that thedesires  of  the  agents  are  projected  onto  theworld”, Baßler says. Then, in a very substantivefootnote that I wish were in the text—his foot-notes contain much of value, and should not bepassed over!—he adds: “What I mean by ‘pro-ject’ is that instead of positing an inner repres-entation . . . . whose function is a desire, alongwith correct beliefs about the current situation,what is posited is an eat-provocative propertyof the apple itself. Both theoretical strategies al-low for the prediction of the same behavior. Thecrucial difference is that attributing new prop-erties  to  objects  that  are already part  of  themodel is a simpler way of extending the modelthan  positing  a  complex  system  of  internalstates to each agent” (Baßler this collection, p.7, footnote 9). This answers question (3).He  then  imagines,  plausibly,  that  these1.5th-order systems will evolve a system of com-munication, but this (as I and others have ar-gued)  necessarily  involves  hiding  informationfrom others, which involves having an internalcache  of  self-monitored  knowledge  one  canchoose to divulge or not, depending on circum-stances. And this in turn—Baßler’s next majorinnovation—leads  them  to  become  “Agents[who] believe in the existence of a special kindof properties: they believe that they approachapples because they are sweet, cuddle babies be-cause they are cute, laugh about jokes becausethey are funny.” This primitive concept of caus-ation serves them well, of course, and is just thesort  of  simplification  to expect  in  a Bayesianbrain, answering question (4).Now for the icing on the cake, Baßler’s an-swer to question (5) about why we care aboutqualia. As he notes, “It is not obvious why wedo not react as disinterestedly to their denial aswe did to the revelation that there is no ether”(Baßler this collection, p. 5). Here is his explan-ation:  science  comes  along  and  starts  to  dis-mantle the handy manifest image, with all itsGibsonian affordances, and for those creaturescapable of understanding science, a new prob-lem arises: something is being taken away fromthem! All those delectable properties (and theabhorrent properties as well, of course). Philo-sophers “still see that there is something miss-ing, and since cuteness is not a property of theoutside world, they conclude that it must be aproperty of the agents themselves” (Baßler thiscollection,  p.  8).  “We have the zombic hunchbecause it seems to us that there is somethingmissing and it seems so because our generativemodels are built on the assumption that thereare properties of things out there in the worldto  which  systems  like  us  react  in  certainways. . . . We dismiss robots because we knowthey can only react to measurable  properties,which do not seem to us to be the direct causeof our behavior” (ibid.).This rings true to me, and I hadn’t seenthis way of accounting for the persistence of thezombic hunch. Baßler proposes that “the reasonwe, intuitively, do not accept a robot as a sub-ject like ourselves is because we know how therobot does it; we know that it calculates, maybeeven in a PP manner–we know that it does notreact directly to the properties that seem to ex-ist and that seem to count” (this collection, p.9). He goes on to list five further features hisaccount provides for.  The properties  we delu-sionally persist in “projecting” as qualia are (1)“‘given directly’ to a person”, (2) “irreducibleto  physical,  mechanical  phenomena”,  (3)“atomic, unstructured”, (4) “important to ourlives/beings  as  humans/persons”,  and  (5)Dennett, D. C. (2015). How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so much - A Reply to David H. Baßler.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570665 3 | 5www.open-mind.net“known to every living human being; it is notpossible  to  sincerely  deny  their  existence”(Baßler this collection, p. 9). I particularly likethe way that his account explains why (4) is afeature: “These properties seem to be the causesof all our behavior: if one did not feel the pain-fulness of a pain, one would not scream; if onedid not sense the funniness of a joke, one wouldnot laugh, etc. Since the model is still neededfor  interacting with others,  despite  theoreticaladvances in the sciences this felt importance ofqualia to our lives is very difficult to overcome”(Baßler this collection, p. 9).I  see  that  my response  consists  in  largemeasure of approving quotations from Baßler’scommentary! But that is as it must be; I wantto confirm in detail and acknowledge the niceway his proposals dovetail with my account, ex-panding it into new territory, and helping mesee what I have so far only dimly appreciated:just how valuable the new Bayesian insights are.But let me end with a friendly amendmentof my own. Baßler’s interpretation of my view isat one point a simplification, probably just forgracefulness  of  exposition,  and perhaps meantitself as a friendly amendment, but I want to is-sue a caveat. Baßler takes me to be saying that,for such properties as cuteness and color, “wemisidentify  dispositions  of  the  organism  withproperties of another object” (this collection, p.3) and goes on to have me holding that “Thismeans, under a personal level description, thatwe believe that there are properties independentof the observer, such as the cuteness of babies,the sweetness of apples, or the blueness of thesky” (ibid., p. 4). I want to put this slightly dif-ferently. It is not that there is nothing objectiveabout babies that makes them cute (or of thesky that makes it blue) but just that these ob-jective,  observer-independent  properties  arethemselves curiously dispositional: they are, ashe  notes  at  one  point,  what  I  have  called“lovely”  properties.  They can only  be  definedrelative to a target species of observers, such asnormally  sighted—not  “color-blind”—humanbeings,  as  contrasted with tetrachromats suchas pigeons, for instance. But their existence asproperties is trivially objective and observer-in-dependent.  Thus  rubies  were  red before  colorvision evolved on this planet in the sense that ifa time machine could take normal human be-ings back to the early earth, they would find ru-bies  to  be  red.  And  some  strata  exposed  byprimordial  earthquake faults  would  have beenvisible, to some kinds of eyes and not to others.Probably  dinosaur babies  were cute,  since,  asJohn Horner (1998)  has  argued,  evidencestrongly  suggests  that  they  were  altricial,  re-quiring  considerable  parental  attention,  andhaving the foreshortened skull and facial struc-ture of prototypically cute juvenile animals, in-cluding birds. The science-endorsed properties,both external and internal, are so hugely differ-ent from what the manifest image makes themout to be, that it is a pickwickian stretch to saythat science has discovered “what cuteness is”or “what color is,” but it is also deeply mislead-ing to say that science has discovered that noth-ing is cute,  or colored, after all.  And so in asimilar vein, I have to contend with how to oc-cupy the awkward middle ground between deny-ing that there are qualia at all, or saying thatqualia are something real, but something utterlyunlike what most people  think (and philosoph-ers say) qualia are. 1 ConclusionBaßler  has  provided  me with a plausible  andtestable  extension  of  my  Intentional  SystemTheory with his innovation of a 1.5th-order in-tentional system, showing in outline how higher-order  intentional  systems  might  evolve  fromtheir more primitive ancestors. And he has alsoshown  new  ways  of  explaining  a  point  thatmany  people  just  cannot  get  their  headsaround. As my former student Ivan Fox (1989)once put it, “Thrown into a causal gap, a qualewill simply fall through it.” See also Fox’s essay,“Our Knowledge of the Internal World” (1994)and  my commentary on it (1994), which I dis-covered, on rereading just now, to be gropingtowards  some  of  the  points  in  Baßler’s  com-mentary. I challenged Ivan Fox to “push furtherinto the engineering and not just revel in thespecs” (Dennett 1994, p. 510), and Baßler hasdone just that.Dennett, D. C. (2015). How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so much - A Reply to David H. Baßler.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570665 4 | 5www.open-mind.netReferencesBaßler, D. H. (2015). Qualia explained away: A comment-ary on Daniel C. Dennett. In T. Metzinger & J. M.Windt  (Eds.)  Open  MIND.  Frankfurt  a.  M.,  GER:MIND Group.Dennett, D. C. (1971). Intentional systems.  The Journalof Philosophy, 68 (4), 87-106. 10.2307/2025382 (1991). Real patterns. The Journal of Philosophy,88 (1), 27-51. 10.2307/2027085 (1994). Get real. Philosophical Topics, 22 (1 & 2),59-106. Fox,  I.  (1994).  Our  knowledge  of  the  internal  world.Philosophical Topics, 22 (1 & 2), 59-106. Hohwy, J. (2015). The neural organ explains the mind. InT.  Metzinger  &  J.  M.  Windt  (Eds.)  Open  MIND.Frankfurt a. M., GER: MIND Group.Horner, J. R., Gorman, J., Henderson, D. & Blumer, T.L. (1998). Maia: A dinosaur grows up. Bozeman, MT:Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University.Marr, D. (1982). Vision. New York, NY: Freeman.Dennett, D. C. (2015). How our Belief in Qualia Evolved, and Why We Care so much - A Reply to David H. Baßler.In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 10(R). Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. doi: 10.15502/9783958570665 5 | 5

How our belief in qualia evolved, and why we care so much : a reply to David H. Baßler

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How our belief in qualia evolved, and why we care so much : a reply to David H. Baßler

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