Subject: for special issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies on AThe Grand Illusion@
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for special issue of
Journal of Consciousness Studies on AThe Grand
Illusion@

January 13,
2002

AHow could I be
wrong? How wrong could I be?@

Daniel C.
Dennett

Center for Cognitive
Studies

Tufts
University

Medford, MA
02155

One of the striking,
even amusing, spectacles to be enjoyed at the many workshops and conferences on
consciousness these days is the breathtaking overconfidence with which laypeople
hold forth about the nature of consciousnessBtheir own in
particular, but everybody=s by extrapolation.
Everybody=s an expert on
consciousness, it seems, and it doesn=t take any knowledge
of experimental findings to secure the home truths these people enunciate with
such conviction.

One of my goals over
the years has been to shatter that complacency, and secure the scientific study
of consciousness on a proper footing. There is no proposition about
one=s own or anybody
else=s conscious
experience that is immune to error, unlikely as that error might
be.  I have come to suspect that refusal to
accept this really quite bland denial of what would be miraculous if true lies
behind most if not all the elaboration of fantastical doctrines about
consciousness recently defended. This refusal fuels the arguments about the
conceivability of zombies, the importance of a Afirst-person@ science of
consciousness, Aintrinsic
intentionality@ and various other
hastily erected roadblocks to progress in the science of consciousness.

You can=t have infallibility
about your own consciousness. Period. But you can get closeBclose enough to
explain why it seems so powerfully as if you do. First of all, the intentional
stance (Dennett, 1971, 1987) guarantees that any entity that is voluminously and
reliably predictable as an intentional system will have a set of beliefs
(including the most intimate beliefs about its personal experiences) that are
mainly true.  So each of us can be
confident that in general what we believe about our conscious experiences
will have an interpretation according to which we are, in the main, right. How
wrong could I be? Not that wrong. Not about most things. There has to be
a way of nudging the interpretation of your manifold of beliefs about your
experience so that it comes out largely innocent of errorBthough this might
not be an interpretation you yourself would be inclined to endorse.  This is not a metaphysical gift, a proof
that we live in the best of all possible worlds. It is something that
automatically falls out of the methodology: when adopting the intentional
stance, one casts about for a maximally charitable (truth-rendering)
interpretation, and there is bound to be one if the entity in question is hale
and hearty in its way.

But it does not
follow from this happy fact that there is a path or method we can follow to
isolate some privileged set of guaranteed-true beliefs. No matter how certain
you are that p, it may turn out that p is one of those relatively
rare errors of yours, an illusion, even if not a grand illusion. But we can get
closer, too.  Once you have an
intentional system with a capacity for communicating in a natural language, it
offers itself as a candidate for the rather special role of self-describer, not
infallible but incorrigible in a limited way: it may be wrong, but there
may be no way to correct it. There may be no truth-preserving interpretation of
all of its expressed opinions (Dennett, 1978, 1991) about its mental
life, but those expressed opinions may be the best source we could have
about what it is like to be it. A version of this idea was made (in-)famous by
Richard Rorty back in his earlier incarnation as an analytic philosopher, and
has been defended by me more recently in AThe Case for
Rorts@ (Dennett, 2000).
There I argue that if, for instance, Cog, the humanoid robot being developed by
Rodney Brooks and his colleagues at MIT, were ever to master English, its own
declarations about its subjectivity would systematically tend to trump the
Athird-person@ opinions of its
makers, even though they would be armed, in the limit, with perfect information
about the micro-mechanical implementation of that subjectivity. This, too, falls
out of the methodology of the intentional stance, which is the only way (I
claim) to attribute content to the states of anything.

The price we pay for
this near-infallibility is that our heterophenomenological worlds may have to be
immersed in a bath of metaphor in order to come out mainly true. That is, our
sincere avowals may have to be rather drastically reconstrued in order to come
out literally true. For instance, when we sincerely tell our interrogators about
the mental images we=re
manipulating,  we may not
think we=re talking about
convolutions of data-structures in our brain--we may well think
we=re talking about
immaterial ectoplasmic composites, or intrinsic qualia, or quantum-perturbations
in our micro-tubules!Bbut if the
interrogators rudely override these ideological glosses and disclaimers of ours
and forcibly re-interpret our propositions as actually being about such
data-structure convolution, these propositions will turn out to be, in the main,
almost all true, and moreover deeply informative about the ways we solve
problems, think about the world, and fuel our subjective opinions in general.
(In this regard, there is nothing special about the brain and its processes; if
you tell the doctor that you have a certain sort of traveling pain in your gut,
your doctor may well decide that you=re actually talking
about your appendixBwhatever you may
think you=re talking
aboutBand act
accordingly.)

Since we are such
reflective and reflexive creatures, we can participate in the adjustment of the
attributions of our own beliefs, and a familiar philosophical Amove@ turns out to be
just such reflective self-re-adjustment, but not a useful one. Suppose you say
you know just what beer tastes like to you now, and you are quite sure you
remember what beer tasted like to you the first time you tasted it, and you can
compare, you say, the way it tastes now to the way it tasted then. Suppose you
declare the taste to be the same. You are then asked: Does anything at all
follow from this subjective similarity in the way of further, objectively
detectable similarities? For instance, does this taste today have the same
higher-order effects on you as it used to have? Does it make you as happy or as
depressed, or does it enhance or diminish your capacity to discriminate colors,
or retrieve synonyms or remember the names of your childhood friends or. . . .
.? Or have your other, surrounding dispositions and habits changed so much in
the interim that it is not to be expected that the very same taste (the same
quale, one may venture to say, pretending to know what one is talking
about) would have any of the same effects at this later date? You may very well
express ignorance about all such implications. All you know, you declare,
is that this beer now tastes just like that first beer did (at least in
some ineffable, intrinsic regard) whether or not it has any of the same
further effects or functions. But by explicitly jettisoning all such
implications from your proposition, you manage to guarantee that it has been
reduced to a vacuity.  You have
jealously guarded your infallibility by seeing to it that you=ve adjusted the
content of your claim all the way down to zero. You can=t be wrong, because
there=s nothing left to be
right or wrong about.

This move is always
available, but it availeth nought. It makes no difference, by the way, whether
you said the beer tastes the same or different; the same point goes through if
you insist it tastes different now. Once your declaration is stripped of all
powers of implication, it is an empty assertion, a mere demonstration that
this is how you fancy talking at this moment. Another version of this
self-vacating move can be seen, somewhat more starkly, in a reaction some folks
opt for when they have it demonstrated to them that their color vision
doesn=t extend to the far
peripheries of their visual fields: They declare that on the contrary, their
color vision in the sense of color experience does indeed extend
to the outer limits of their phenomenal fields; they just disavow any
implications about what this color experience they enjoy might enable them to
doBe.g., identify by
name the colors of the objects there to be experienced! They are right, of
course, that it does not follow from the proposition that one is having
color experiences that one can identify the colors thus experienced, or do
better than chance in answering same-different? questions, or use color
differences to detect shapes (as in a color- blindness test) to take the most
obvious further effects. But if nothing follows from the claim that their
peripheral field is experienced as colored, their purported disagreement with
the researchers= claim that their
peripheral field lacks color altogether evaporates.

O=Regan and Noë (2001)
argue that my heterophenomenology makes the mistake of convicting naive subjects
of succumbing to a grand illusion.

But is it true that
normal perceivers think of their visual fields this way [as in sharp detail and
uniform focus from the center out to the periphery]? Do normal perceivers really
make this error? We think not. . . . . normal perceivers do not have ideological
commitments concerning the resolution of the visual field. Rather, they take the
world to be sold, dense, detailed and present and they take themselves to be
embedded in and thus to have access to the world. [pXXX]

My response to this was:

Then why do normal
perceivers express such surprise when their attention is drawn to facts about
the low resolution (and loss of color vision, etc) of their visual
peripheries?  Surprise is a
wonderful dependent variable, and should be used more often in experiments; it
is easy to measure and is a telling betrayal of the subject=s having expected
something else. These expectations are, indeed, an overshooting of the
proper expectations of a normally embedded perceiver-agent; people
shouldn=t have these
expectations, but they do. People are shocked, incredulous, dismayed; they often
laugh and shriek when I demonstrate the effects to them for the first
time.(Dennett, 2001, pXXXX)

O=Regan and Noë (see
also Noë, Pessoa, and Thompson, (2000) Noë (2001), and Noë and O'Regan,
forthcoming) are right that it need not seem to people that they have a detailed
picture of the world in their heads. But typically it does. It also need not
seem to them that they are not Azombies@ but typically it
does.  People like to have
Aideological
commitments.@ They are inveterate
amateur theorizers about what is going on in their heads, and they can be mighty
wrong when they set out on these paths.

For instance, quite
a few theorizers are very, very sure that they have something that they
sometimes call original intentionality. They are prepared to agree that
interpretive adjustments can enhance the reliability of the so-called reports of
the so-called content of the so-called mental states of a robot like Cog,
because those internal states have only derived intentionality, but they
are of the heartfelt opinion that we human beings, in contrast, have the real
stuff: we are endowed with genuine mental states that have content quite
independently of any such charitable scheme of interpretation.  That=s how it seems to
them, but they are wrong.

How could they be
wrong? They could be wrong about this because they could be wrong about
anythingBbecause they are not
gods. How wrong could they be?
Until we excuse them for their excesses and re-interpret their
extravagant claims in the light of good third-person science, they can be
utterly, bizarrely wrong. Once they relinquish their ill-considered grip on the
myth of first-person authority and recognize that their limited incorrigibility
depends on the liberal application of a principle of charity by third-person
observers who know more than they do about what is going on in their own heads,
they can become invaluable, irreplaceable informants in the investigation of
human consciousness.

References:

Dennett, 1971,
AIntentional
Systems,@ J.Phil,
68, pp87‑106

Dennett, 1978,
AHow to Change your
Mind,@ in
Brainstorms, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dennett, 1987,
The Intentional Stance,  Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.

Dennett, 1991,
Consciousness Explained, Boston: Little, Brown, and London: Allen
Lane 1992.

Dennett, 2000,
AThe Case for
Rorts,@ in Robert Brandom,
ed., Rorty and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwells.

Dennett, 2001,
ASurprise,
surprise,@ commentary on
O=Regan and  Noë, 2001, BBS, 24, 5,
pp.xxxx.

O'Regan and Noë,
2001. BBS, 24, 5, pp.xxxxx

Noë, A., Pessoa, L.,
Thompson, E. (2000) Beyond the grand illusion: what change
blindness

really teaches us
about vision. Visual Cognition.7, 2000: 93‑106.

Noë, A. (2001)
Experience and the active mind. Synthese 129: 41‑60.

Noë, A. O'Regan, J.
K. Perception, attention and the grand illusion.Psyche6 (15)
URL:

http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v6/psyche‑6‑15‑noe.html