Consciousness eliminated in Daniel Dennett

Abstract

One of the major debates in philosophy of mind is the complication about how to explain the manifestation of qualia in the scientific image. Qualia have usually been understood as phenomenal properties of mental states; and their resistance against physical explanation is famously demonstrated by Joseph Levine as the explanatory gap and by David Chalmers as the hard problem of consciousness. The aim of this thesis is to study and evaluate Daniel Dennett’s response to the complication in this debate with his eliminativist approach on consciousness. The key idea of Dennett’s so-called illusionism is that qualia only seem to exist but actually do not. By rejecting the ontology of qualia as phenomenal properties, Dennett proposes that qualia as illusions can be completely explained in terms of physical mechanism of the brain. The thesis also considers the main criticism to Dennett’s idea which is referred to as ‘the datum objection’. The datum objection, proposed by contemporary philosophers e.g. David Chalmers and John Searle, criticizes that by rejecting the ontology of qualia as phenomenal properties, Dennett denies the crucial data that theory of mind is supposed to explain. Nonetheless, my analysis on Dennett’s arguments shows that his view does not deny the crucial data as being opposed. In contrast, his rejection of the existence of the data even introduces a new perspective in this debate and enables him to fulfill two satisfying conditions that other theories cannot achieve before -- that is (1) to preserve the fascinating phenomenon of conscious experience as it appears in the manifest image, and (2) to conserve the convention of contemporary scientific explanation as we know in the scientific image. The thesis then draws a conclusion that eliminativist approach on consciousness in Daniel Dennett should be taken seriously as a default theory. This is because it possesses a potential to explain qualia in the scientific image with minimal compromises from both the folk psychology about qualia and the convention of scientific explanation compared with other approaches.