People are often baffled by my theory of consciousness, which seems to them to be summed up neatly in the paradoxical claim that consciousness is an illusion. How could that be? Whose illusion? And would it not be a conscious illusion? What a hopeless view! In a better world, the principle of charity would set in and they would realise that I probably had something rather less daft in mind, but life is short, and we’ll have one less difficult and counterintuitive theory to worry about if we just dismiss Dennett’s as the swiftly self-refuting claim that consciousness is an illusion. Other theorists, including, notably, Nicholas Humphrey (2006, 2011), Thomas Metzinger (2003, 2009) and Jesse Prinz (2012), know better, and offer theories that share important features with mine. I toyed with the idea of trying to re-offer my theory in terms that would signal the areas of agreement and disagreement with these welcome allies, but again, life is short, and I have found that task simply too much hard work. So with apologies, I’m going to restate my position with a few new—or at least newly emphasized—wrinkles, and let them tell us where we agree and disagree.
I take one of the usefully wrong landmarks in current thinking about consciousness to be Ned Block’s attempt to distinguish “phenomenal consciousness” from “access consciousness.” His view has several problems that I have pointed out before (Dennett 1994, 1995, 2005; Cohen & Dennett 2011), but my criticisms have not been sufficiently persuasive, so I am going to attempt, yet again, to show why we should abandon this distinction as scientifically insupportable and deeply misleading. My attempt should at least help put my alternative view in a better light, where it can be assayed against the views of Block and others. Here is the outline, couched in terms that will have to be clarified and adjusted as we go along:
There is no double transduction in the brain. (section 1)
Therefore there is no second medium, the medium of consciousness or, as I like to call this imaginary phenomenon, the MEdium.
Therefore, qualia, conceived of as states of this imaginary medium, do not exist.
But it seems to us that they do. (section 2) It seems that qualia are the source or cause of our judgments about phenomenal properties (“access consciousness”), but this is backwards. If they existed, they would have to be the effects of those judgments.
The seeming alluded to in proposition 2 is to be explained in terms of Bayesian expectations. (section 3)
Why do qualia seem simple and ineffable? This is an effect, a byproduct, an artifact of “access consciousness.” (section 4)
Whose access? Not a witness in the Cartesian Theater (because there is no such functional place). (section 5)
The access of other people! Our “first-person” subjectivity is shaped by the pressure of “second-persons”—interlocutors—to have practical access to what is going on in our minds.
A thought experiment shows how even color qualia can be understood as Bayesian projections.