While the Inverted Spectrum Theory and the Zombie Argument are widely accepted, not everyone finds the idea of qualia quaffable. Daniel Dennett, perhaps qualia’s biggest critic, provides an argument against these spontaneous perceptions in his book Consciousness Explained (1991). In his book, Dennett provides an argument against qualia by claiming that its definition breaks down with a more practical application. Dennett pits the idea of qualia against real-world neurosurgery and clinical psychology. He contends that in the context of real-world application, qualia has no use in the situations above, and the potentially useful questions that it presents are unanswerable because of its own fundamental properties. Let’s go back to the second scenario. You wake up on the café floor, and just like before, all of the colors have been inverted. You know immediately that something is wrong. You hypothesize that some mystery ingredient in your warm beverage must have caused your optic nerves to go haywire and invert your qualia. However, you soon realize that your qualia is not the only thing that could have changed. Perhaps it is not the colors that have been inverted, but your connection to memories of past qualia that have been altered. Both of these options have the same result, and you have absolutely no way of knowing which has occurred. What was in that coffee anyway? The only thing you’re sure of now is that from now on you’ll stick to water. The main fault Dennett finds with qualia is that it relies too heavily on memory. The only way to notice a change in qualia is to point out an incongruence with our past memories of qualia. However, what we remember are only construed memories of qualia, and not the qualia themselves. Dennett confirms through this thought experiment that we cannot prove the existence of qualia simply through introspection. Our memory is inconsistent and subjective to say the least, and as such it cannot be used as concrete evidence to prove or disprove qualia. Without going into too much detail, memory is subject to alterations by a number of influences. Drugs, physical and mental trauma, mental disorders, and stress, along with a slew of other factors can influence our surprisingly fragile minds. Memory is also quite subjective. Everyone’s memories possess some degree of subjectivity, because each individual has their own level of perceived memory ability—independent from objective standards or performance. Subjective memory is defined as the reflection of one’s perceptions about his or her personal memory functioning. That word, “perception,” should set off a few red flags. That’s right, our memory itself is a collection of perceptions, or qualia! We cannot define qualia Page 26
27 Publizr Home