The first of Rapoport’s Rules[1] for composing a critical commentary states that one should present the target view in the most charitable way possible (Dennett 2013a). Although I generally agree with many of Daniel Dennett’s views, especially his argument against the existence of qualia (constituting the first part of the target paper), the diagnosis that there is the zombic hunch,[2] along with his strategy for explaining why it exists, the connection between qualia and predicted dispositions, was hard to grasp. Dennett presents the idea that when we talk about qualia, what we really refer to are our dispositions in earlier works (e.g., Dennett 1991). But the connection to predictive processing is new (see also Dennett 2013b). There still seem to be some stepping stones missing, which I hope to fill in with my reconstruction. My goal is to provide a complete story that sticks as close to Dennett’s argument as possible. This paper is not supposed to be a “rebuttal” or “criticism”, but an “attempt to re-express [Dennett]’s position” (see footnote 1).
The structure of this commentary is as follows: in the first section I shall give a short outline of Dennett’s explanation of why we have the zombic hunch. Since this involves the predictive processing framework, I shall give a very short introduction to this first. Following this, I present a short list of five questions that have not, in my opinion, yet been sufficiently addressed. In the second section I present an interpretation, or perhaps an extension, of Dennett’s answers to these questions, by relying on the concept of an intentional system and using a strategy involving telling the counterfactual story of the evolution of some agents who end up believing in qualia (although ex hypothesi there are none). In the third section I shall analyze which features qualia should have, according to the beliefs of these agents, and show that there is at least a significant overlap with features many consider qualia to have.
I want to give a short justification for the unorthodox way of accounting for beliefs about x instead of for x’s existence itself. This is a general strategy found in other areas of Dennett’s work. For example, he has asked, “Why should we think there is intentionality although there is none?” (Dennett 1971), “Why should we believe there is a god although there is none?” (Dennett 2006), and “Why should we think there is a problem with determinism and free will although there is none?” (Dennett 1984, 2004). Dennett’s philosophy can in parts be seen as a therapeutic approach to “philosopher’s syndrome”—“mistaking failures of imagination for insights into necessity” (e.g., Dennett 1991, p. 401; Dennett 1998a, p. 366)—by making it easier to see why we are convinced of the existence of something, even when there are good reasons to believe that it doesn’t exist.
I want to draw attention to Hume’s Of Miracles (Hume 1995, X), where he states that the likelihood of a testimony about miracles being wrong is always greater than the likelihood of the miracle itself. This serves as a nice analogy for the case at hand: we might think of our own mind as a good “witness”, but we already know too much about its shortcomings. So we should be suspicious when it cries out for a revolution in science or metaphysics, because this cry rests on the belief that something is missing, when no data but this very belief itself makes the demand necessary. Instead we should examine what else could have led our minds to form this conviction.