Qualia Explained Away

In his paper “Why and how does consciousness seem the way it seems?”, Daniel Dennett argues that philosophers and scientists should abandon Ned Block’s distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. First he lays out why the assumption of phenomenal consciousness as a second medium is not a reasonable idea. In a second step he shows why beings like us must be convinced that there are qualia, that is, why we have the strong temptation to believe in their existence. This commentary is exclusively concerned with this second part of the target paper. In particular, I offer a more detailed picture, guided by five questions that are not addressed by Dennett. My proposal, however, still resides within the framework of Dennett’s philosophy in general. In particular I use the notion of intentional systems of different orders to fill in some details. I tell the counterfactual story of some first-order intentional systems evolving to become believers in qualia as building blocks of their world.