1

Two materialist theories of qualia: Daniel Dennett’s

Consciousness Explained and Nicholas Humphrey’s

Soul Dust.

Richard Sandlant

January 2014

2

Introduction A key question regarding consciousness is whether its very existence tells us something profound

about the nature of the universe. As numerous philosophers and scientists have observed,

consciousness just doesn’t seem to be what we would expect to find in a material, physical universe.

The philosopher Thomas Nagel put it this way:

“The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical description of the

universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory power, is only part of the truth, and

that the natural order is far less austere than it would be if physics and chemistry

accounted for everything”.1

So what is the other part of the truth? Consciousness seems to imply that there is something more

to the universe than the austere physical description alone. But what could this be?

It’s difficult to put your finger on it, precisely because it does not appear to be ‘physical’.

Consciousness is qualitative and subjective, it shows that there is a within to things2, there is

something it is like to be3, and perhaps most starkly of all, consciousness involves ‘qualia’. More

than just the colour ‘red’, qualia are every phenomenological aspect of your being. The experience

of consciousness, at times, is a blazing cornucopia of sensation and feeling.

Indeed of all these things, qualia such as the colour ‘red’ stand out as being the most distinctive, the

most noticeable, and the most visible feature of consciousness; no doubt because qualia are our

sense experiences, one and the same. In this paper I want to focus on qualia in particular.

The question is: how could something subjective like qualia even exist in a physical, material

universe? This is the ‘Hard Problem’.4 And does the existence of consciousness imply that there is

something more to the universe than the standard materialist account?

You don’t have to believe in God, souls, spirits or the supernatural to think that consciousness might

reveal something important about the nature of the universe. If it’s not the austere, physical

domain of matter as traditionally conceived by science, then what is it?

The existence of consciousness seems to imply something radical about the fundamental nature of

the universe. But of course, not everyone agrees with this proposition. There are many scientists

and philosophers who believe there simply must be some mistake here.

Their reasoning runs something like this: we know that the universe is material and physical; a

material, physical universe can’t include something subjective like consciousness; therefore

consciousness must be an illusion of some kind. If it doesn’t fit with a materialistic account of the

1 Thomas Nagel (2012), Mind and Cosmos, Oxford University Press, p.35.

2 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955, 1980 edition), The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, p.60.

3 Thomas Nagel (1974), “What is it like to be a bat?”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, pp. 435-50.

4 See David J. Chalmers (1996), The Conscious Mind, Oxford University Press. Steven Pinker's response: "Beats

the heck out of me!" Steven Pinker (1997), How the Mind Works, Penguin Books, p.146.

3

universe, there must be less to consciousness than meets the eye. We must be fooling ourselves, or

looking at things the wrong way.

I call these “nothing to see here, move along” theories of consciousness. In this paper I’m going to

take a close look at two excellent examples: Consciousness Explained by the philosopher Daniel

Dennett, and Soul Dust by the theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey.5 Both are ‘popular’

books that you are likely to find in the non-fiction section of any bookstore. As such, they are

influential, and actively shape public views about consciousness.

These authors are fascinating because they try to explain away their own conscious experience, their

own qualia. As the philosopher John Searle puts it, how could an intelligent person paint themselves

into such a corner?6 They certainly give it a good try, but as well as being crazy it is also of course

dehumanising. They end up saying that we are all some kind of deluded zombie, or machine.

Now, there are philosophers who allow for consciousness within a physical, materialistic paradigm,

who say that consciousness is irreducible. John Searle argues that consciousness is a natural

biological product of brain activity, and is just as ‘real’ as anything else in the natural world. The only

problem he admits, is that we have no idea how brains could cause conscious mental states.7 As

problems go, this is a good one, as the philosopher Jerry Fodor puts it:

“Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even

knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material

could be conscious.”8

But against such pessimism, the philosopher Galen Strawson argues that complex combinations of

common, garden-variety elements in the brain such as carbon, sodium, oxygen, potassium, and so

on, can produce consciousness, and this simply tells us that physical matter is much more amazing

than we previously thought.

“A materialist can grant that current physics is incomplete, in failing to explain how

conscious experience is possible, while insisting that it is for all that a natural physical

fact—as natural a fact as the fact that water is wet—that when you get physical things

like human brains you invariably get phenomenology with all its qualitative

astonishments”.9

The view that consciousness is a natural property of the physical world often includes the sidebar

that it is an emergent property generated by the operation of a system of great complexity (such as

5 Daniel C. Dennett (1991), Consciousness Explained, Penguin Books. Nicholas Humphrey (2011), Soul Dust.

The Magic of Consciousness, Princeton University Press.

6 John Searle (1997), The Mystery of Consciousness, A New York Review of Books Book, p. 112.

7 Ibid, p.192-93.

8 Jerry Fodor, ‘The Big Idea: Can There Be A Science of Mind?’, Times Literary Supplement, July 3, 1992.

9 Galen Strawson, ‘The self as software. Review of Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett’, Times Literary

Supplement, August 21, 1992.

4

the brain). For example, John Searle argues that consciousness is simply a higher-level or system

feature in the brain that is caused by lower-level neurobiological processes. This is not dualism,

Searle assures us, since the conscious states in question are not a separate entity from the brain, but

are simply a feature of the brain.10

Emergence is a very useful concept, and does seem to me to describe an important aspect of what is

going on, but it has its problems too. For example, what exactly is it that emerges? Is it something

completely new or is it just a variation on what already exists?

If it is something completely new are we proposing a miracle? How could something

completely new like consciousness pop into existence out of physical processes? How could

Mind come from No-Mind? Some say this is just a modern variant of Vitalism.11

If consciousness is a variation on what already exists are we proposing panpsychism? If

there is some thread of continuity running all the way from elementary particles to

consciousness, is there something about consciousness which is somehow fundamental to

all matter in the universe?

I’ll come back to these questions, but for now it is enough to note that there are alternatives to the

“nothing to see here, move along” approach to consciousness. What Dennett and Humphrey are

saying is extreme (though of course they wouldn’t see it that way). Indeed, Searle describes it as a

“form of intellectual pathology”.12 It’s not just that they say that our phenomenal experience of

qualia is somehow an illusion, or that we’re not really seeing the colour ‘red’, or that qualia don’t

really exist in the way that we think that they do—they argue that qualia don’t exist at all.

Why do Dennett and Humphrey feel compelled to take this line? The explanation seems to be that

they want to uphold the highest scientific standards in their work, and to that extent we shouldn’t

fault them. Science is characterised by objectivity, third-person description, a physicalist, materialist

conception of the universe, and a deep aversion to anything resembling metaphysical, ‘spooky stuff’.

As Humphrey puts it:

“Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has

to be an illusion. The reason is obvious. If nothing in the physical world can have the

features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing

in the physical world” [emphasis added].13

Consciousness and qualia, if they exist and are real, imply that the universe is not what the current

physicalist paradigm in science thinks it is like. This proposition is radical in its implications, though

Dennett and Humphrey simply think it is ‘unscientific’. We’ll eventually grow out of our delusions,

they say. Well, let’s see how convincing their arguments are.

10

Searle, ibid, p. 8.

11 Donna Jeanne Haraway (1976, 2004), Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, North Atlantic Books, p.193.

12 Searle, ibid, p.112.

13 Nicholas Humphrey, “Consciousness: the Achilles heel of Darwinism? Thank God, not quite” in John

Brockman, ed. (2006), Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, Vintage, pp. 50-64.

5

Consciousness Explained Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, first published in 1991, is an entertaining book full of

stories, thought experiments, analogies and metaphors, which make it rather infuriating for people,

like me, who just want to pin down what he is actually saying.

Dennett begins by excluding pesky alternatives from serious consideration. He explicitly embraces a

‘scientific, materialistic’ approach to consciousness and rejects any form of dualism (25).

Materialism of one sort or another, he tells us, is now “a received opinion approaching unanimity”

(106).

As Thomas Nagel writes, Dennett’s methodological approach is “essentially Gilbert Ryle crossed with

Scientific American”.14 Gilbert Ryle, influential behaviourist and author of The Concept of Mind15, was

Dennett’s philosophy professor and D.Phil. supervisor at Oxford University.

Dennett is a behaviourist who excludes subjective mental events from being scientific data on the

grounds that they cannot be objectively verified. He therefore approaches consciousness entirely

from a third-person perspective “since all science is constructed from that perspective” (71).

If you find it odd that someone would write a book about consciousness without considering

subjective mental events, but who instead only looks at the observable behaviour associated with

subjective mental events, you might be forgiven for thinking this is unduly restrictive, and indeed

there is a popular sense in which behaviourism is regarded as the “dark ages” of psychology16.

In fact, as Searle and others have pointed out, scientific objectivity does not demand an approach

this restrictive.17 And by deliberately excluding the subjective description of the very thing he is

trying to explain, one gets the impression that Dennett is setting out not so much to explain

consciousness as to do away with it.

Hence, sounding a lot like his mentor Ryle, he tells us that he is going to demystify consciousness, to

break the spell, to resolve the paradox, to help us grow out of our naïve, childish illusions, to trade

our ‘shallow magic’ for the truth, to see that there is nothing ‘special’ going on, or at least not what

we think.

So how successful is he at doing this?

A large part of the book deals with picking apart what he calls the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ and replacing

that model with a more realistic ‘Many Drafts’ model. This is all very well, but the real prize, as

Dennett knows, is qualia. Qualia seem so real to us and so different to anything else in the physical

14

Thomas Nagel (1999), “Dennett: Consciousness Dissolved”, in Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969-1994,

Oxford University Press, p.86. (Originally published in the Wall Street Journal, November 7, 1991.

15 Gilbert Ryle (1949), The Concept of Mind, Penguin Books.

16 See Henry L. Roediger, III, “What Happened to Behaviourism”, Observer, December 2013.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/uncategorized/what-happened-to-behaviorism.html.

17 John Searle, TEDxCERN talk, “Our Shared Condition—Consciousness”, July 2013.

6

universe. He can’t deny, in this sense, that qualia ‘exist’ (45). Therefore, he can only argue that this

existence is not what we think it is.

Qualia, Dennett recognises, are totally unlike the denizens of the material world (electrons, atoms,

molecules, etc). How could physical matter, in any shape or form, have such unusual ‘intrinsic

qualities’? How can we have this privileged access, this special intimacy? How could anything

composed of material particles be “the fun that I am having”? (65)

So how does he break the spell? Well, by ‘chipping away’, by showing us first of all that we should

not be over-confident about what we believe about the content of our own conscious experience

(69). To begin with, as previously noted, we shouldn’t rely on a first-person perspective, because

“you are not authoritative about what is happening in you, but only about what seems to be

happening in you” (96). It is simply more ‘scientific’ to exclude first-person evidence.

By creating doubts about what it is that we actually experience compared to what we think we

experience, Dennett hopes to open up ‘a space of possibilities’ (95) that will to allow us to imagine

that what you and I are really referring to when we talk about our qualia could be something

completely different.

Now, removing our own subjective experiences of qualia from the picture is taking the conclusion

and using it as one of the premises. Sure, I might be ‘wrong’ about what seems to be happening to

me, but that still leaves me with what seems to be happening to me. As Thomas Nagel puts it:

“A theory of consciousness that doesn’t include mental events is like a book about

Picasso that doesn’t mention his paintings”.18

And as John Searle puts it:

“The net effect is a performance of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark”.19

Or as I would put it:

“It’s like Star Wars without The Force”.

But all this seems fine to Dennett. We’re not ‘ignoring’ qualia, because we’re listening to what

people tell us they think they are experiencing with qualia. This is a more defensible, scientific

approach (to a behaviourist). It’s just that, because we can’t trust what people tell us about their

qualia, we’re already half way towards discounting what they say entirely. We can therefore treat

our subjects’ testimony as a ‘fiction’ that they (of course) sincerely believe to exist in their stream of

consciousness (98). From this point, we simply need to identify a ‘real candidate’ to explain why it

seems to our subjects that these fictional qualia experiences exist (98).

But before getting there, Dennett has more ‘chipping away’ to do. A large part of his book consists

in dethroning the ‘Central Meaner’. This is the seeming homunculus in our heads who sees qualia in

18

Thomas Nagel (1999), “Dennett: Consciousness Dissolved”, in Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969-1994,

Oxford University Press, p.88.

19 John Searle (1997), The Mystery of Consciousness, A New York Review of Books Book, p. 100.

7

their ‘mind’s eye’. But there is no central HQ, Dennett shows us, no ‘mind’s eye’, no ‘Cartesian

Theatre’ where it all comes together (253). Instead, there is pandemonium, ‘Multiple Drafts’. Our

brains are virtual ‘Joycean machines’ (228), computer programs infested by memes (209).

Consciousness, Dennett suggests, is simply the virtual machine becoming the object of its own

perceptual systems (225-6).

All of this is fine, if a little dated by now, but what of qualia? We still haven’t got there, you may

have noticed. Meanwhile, on the subject of consciousness, Dennett freely admits that everyone

(including himself) “has to mumble, guess and hand wave about large parts of the problem” (255).

He modestly describes his work as showing how a theory could be constituted, rather than providing

or confirming the theory in all its details (256).

Yes, but what about qualia? Whether Dennett’s ‘Joycean machine’ explains consciousness or not, he

still hasn’t told us what’s going on with qualia. It certainly seems as if we can picture and manipulate

objects in our ‘mind’s eye’. Surely there is something going on here? (298)

Dennett points out that, obviously, there are no real ‘colours’ in our brain when we look at a red

apple, for example. When we ‘see a colour’ our brain must be coding somehow for the colour (350).

There must be some sort of vector system taking place somewhere in the brain. But, says Dennett, if

this is the case then the brain is simply representing to us that the colour ‘red’ is being experienced.

It doesn’t really produce ‘red’, or fill in anything with the pigment ‘red’, or even a ‘figment’ of red,

for that matter (355).

Now we’re getting to the meat of it! When you experience qualia, Dennett tells us, all you’re really

doing is thinking that you’re experiencing qualia. You are not using your mind’s eye to ‘see red’ on

some virtual canvas in your brain. There’s no canvass and there’s nothing ‘red’ really going on in

your brain. There is no ‘decoding’ of nerve impulses into actual ‘red’ (364).

All that’s going on, you see, is a brain process. Your brain is making a judgement. “There is nothing

more to phenomenology than that” (366). Qualia are like “a beautiful discussion of purple, just

about a colour, without itself being coloured” (371). A judgement is devoid of colour (372).

Dennett concludes:

“I seem to be denying that there are any such properties as qualia, and for once what

seems to be so is so. I am denying that there are any such properties. But (here comes

that theme again) I agree wholeheartedly that there seem to be qualia”. (372)

So, on the one hand Dennett says there are no qualia and yet on the other he admits that we have

this really clear sense that we are experiencing qualia, with all its vibrancy and phenomenally rich

qualities, but all that is really going on here is “mere complexes of mechanically accomplished

dispositions to react” (386). There is nothing to see here, move along.

In fact, bravely pushing things a bit, Dennett tells us that there is no real difference between a wine-

tasting machine and a human wine-taster. The machine and we are the same in that neither of us

has qualia (375). Yes, he admits the consequence of this view is that we are zombies. Nobody is

conscious, at least not in the mysterious way that we might have thought (406). A suitably complex

8

and programmed robot would be just as ‘conscious’ as us. We are just complex, organic machines

(432).

For all this, I think Dennett must be applauded for following the physicalist, materialist argument to

its logical conclusion and for having the guts to say it out loud (even if he could be clearer and more

concise at times). The question is: has he succeeded in explaining qualia?

Before we assess how well Dennett has done, let’s take a look at the closely related argument

Humphrey comes up with.

Soul Dust Nicholas Humphrey’s Soul Dust, first published in 2011, is a well-written book with lots of interesting

ideas. Humphrey and Dennett are colleagues and it would seem that Dennett has influenced

Humphrey in respect to what qualia are. I’m only going to focus on what Humphrey says about

qualia, so keep that in mind.

Humphrey begins by acknowledging the ‘Hard Problem’ head-on. Consciousness seems to be an

impossible thing, he says, because we cannot see how it could come from a material, physical

universe.

Unfortunately, the position Humphrey takes is that if consciousness is impossible, then it can’t exist,

the problem must be confused, and we must be thinking of it in the wrong way. The mystery will

dissolve when we see it from the right perspective. There is, in fact, a straightforward physical

explanation (6).

I have to say, that Humphrey claims rather a lot for the straightforward physical explanation he

offers in his book. It’s a good book, but I’m not sure that he is entirely justified in saying that with

his argument we are “home and dry”. (63) And given the difficulty anyone has in explaining

consciousness and qualia, little alarm bells ring when he asks rhetorically: “Who says now that it

can’t be done” (64).

Usually, any claim that there is a straightforward physical explanation of consciousness sounds more

like something that would address the ‘Easy Problem’, which is concerned with the physical and

biological mechanisms by which consciousness might be generated in the human brain. The ‘Hard

Problem’, by contrast, is really an ontological problem—how to account for the experience of qualia

at all in a physical universe. The mere existence of ‘qualia’ and ‘consciousness’ imply that the notion

of a ‘straightforward physical’ universe might be a tad naïve.

But Humphrey, of course, comes at the problem from the opposite direction. If experience and

consciousness seem impossible in a physical universe, then it’s not because we’ve got too narrow a

view of what a physical universe could be, rather it’s because we haven’t got the right idea of what

experience and consciousness are. In fact, the solution to this seemingly impossible problem is to

remove our erroneous ideas about experience and consciousness from the picture. If qualia don’t

really exist in the way we thought they did, then voila, problem solved!

So how does Humphrey accomplish this disappearing act? He begins by asking what we would find if

we looked inside the heads of conscious subjects. We would, he answers, find the “neural correlates

of consciousness”. No surprises there. And even if we don’t understand how all this complex

9

machinery works, we can be confident at least that there are “neurophenomenological laws” that

enable experiences to be computed (his words). “We need not doubt that the laws exist and will

eventually be found out”. All this is fairly straightforward.

But, says Humphrey, you may think that all you would get from this exercise would be merely a

description of an experience and not any handle on what that experience actually is. Well yes, I

would agree with that, but Humphrey hastens to correct me. “Wrong” he says.

“You have fallen for the tempting idea that there is something conscious experience

actually is that is separate from what the subject thinks it is”. (19)

Hmm. Now this sounds like the same idea that Dennett had. To be conscious of something,

Humphrey is saying, means that you represent that something as something else, with “properties of

a special and peculiar kind”. (29) You represent that something as something that it may not, in

actual fact, be. He seems to mean by this that your brain represents a sensation as if it is an

experience, when in reality it is not an experience. Rather, it is something else, presumably

something physical and mechanical.

Humphrey has a bit of a straw-man argument to back this up. He argues that the only alternative to

this view would be to posit experiences as residing in some transcendental, non-material realm. (31)

Of course, this is not the only alternative, but Humphrey is not really interested in alternatives.

Humphrey starts from the position that none of the alternatives are scientific. This only leaves one

possibility—consciousness must be an illusion.

Humphrey simply must explain consciousness away. He is like a James Randi watching an illusionist

perform a magic trick—he knows that the assistant was not cut in half! There is only one possible

explanation. All he has to do is work back from there.

The book includes at this point some Kantian metaphysics. Humphrey points out that we can never

know the outside world ‘as-it-is-in-itself’. Any experience we have of something in the ‘outside

world’ is by necessity a phenomenal representation of that object reconstructed in our brain.

This allows Humphrey to say, with justification, that “the phenomenal properties of sensation are an

illusion”. (32) But of course, such an illusion must be generated by something and there are no prizes

for guessing what—it must be the human brain. Consciousness, Humphrey concludes, “is the

product of some kind of illusion chamber, a charade”. (33)

Now, none of this is remarkable per se. We know the human brain takes sensory input and creates /

generates conscious experience. This conscious experience is what we broadly call qualia, and

although we know the human brain generates it the ‘Hard Problem’ is not so much to explain the

physics, chemistry and biology involved but rather the ontological existence of qualia at all in a

physical, material world.

But here is where Humphrey (and Dennett) makes the key move in their argument. What they are

saying is that the brain fools us into thinking that the phenomenal sensations in the illusion chamber

have an ‘as-if’, qualia-like property. In reality, Humphrey says, there are no qualia!

10

To Humphrey, the brain presents to you an experience as-if you are having an experience. This ‘as-if

experience’ is more than just an optical illusion (he calls it the “consciousness illusion”). In fact,

Humphrey feels the need to invent a word—the “Ipsundrum”—for this “hypothesised, illusion-

generating inner creation in response to sensory stimulation”. (40)

“You respond to sensory input by creating, as a personal response, a seemingly

otherworldly object, an ipsundrum, which you present to yourself in your inner

theatre”. Your conscious experience is a “magical mystery show that you lay on for

yourself” (40), a “self-generated show” (50), a “subjective illusion of being in the

presence of mysterious qualia”. (51)

Now, granted, there are a few more wrinkles in the argument, involving a splash of complexity,

chaos, self-organisation and emergence. Humphrey suggests that through evolutionary processes

our brains developed a capacity to observe our own sensations, which he calls “Sentition”. This

capacity to step back from the show then enabled a highly evolved mathematical object comprised

of various complex re-entrant loops and emergent features to come into being, which he calls the

“Gregundrum”.

Humphrey freely admits this bit of the story is “highly speculative” and in fact invites the reader to

“skip it” (54). I found it a bit odd that Humphrey invites the reader to ‘skip’ what seems to be a key

part of his argument, but I certainly sympathise with the sentiment.

Despite these reservations, Humphrey rattles off in rapid succession a dazzling array of sexy terms

such as “complex dynamic pattern”, “re-entrant feedback loops”, “self-sustaining”, “recursion”,

“attractor states”, “infinite dimensions”, “activity in neural circuits” and “computation that

integrates what happens over time”. None of which, if you stop to think about it, is really that

remarkable. “In short, the ipsundrum is a bit like a developing thunderstorm, a bit like a wheeling

flock of starlings, a bit like a musical sonata”. (56)

So, it’s time to step back and assess whether Dennett and Humphrey have really succeeded in

‘explaining’ qualia.

Conclusion The most interesting thing about Dennett and Humphrey’s books, and the reception they have

received, is that Dennett and Humphrey think they have succeeded in explaining away the ‘mystery’

of qualia, while their critics think they have missed the mark. Both sides are highly intelligent, both

sides understand the ‘Hard Problem’, so how could they seriously be in disagreement about

something like this?

The critics say that there is nothing remarkable in saying that qualia are an illusion my brain puts on,

like a magical mystery show. Telling me that my brain puts on a show making me think I’m

experiencing something is what I’ve always understood my brain to be doing. The question is: how

on earth can this magical mystery show even exist in a physical, material world? Illusions and

magical mystery shows are just as radical, just as difficult to explain, as ‘qualia’ in a physical and

materialistic universe. This is what qualia are anyway.

11

Galen Strawson: “You say that there seems to be consciousness, but that there isn't really

any. But what can this experience of seeming to be conscious be, if not a conscious

experience? How can one have a genuine illusion of having red-experience without

genuinely having red-experience in having the supposed illusion?"20

John Searle: “You can’t disprove the existence of conscious experiences by proving that they

are only an appearance disguising the underlying reality, because where consciousness is

concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality”.21

The critics’ point is not difficult to understand, so why can’t Humphrey and Dennett see it? The

answer is that Humphrey and Dennett can see it, of course, but when they speak of “illusion” they

appear to be referring to something that goes one step further.

There seem to be two levels of illusion here. First, there is the type of illusion where the qualia that

you experience are not what you think they are (and the critics say this doesn’t matter, it’s still

qualia). Second, there is the type of illusion where you think you’re experiencing something but you

are really not experiencing anything at all, which is the type of illusion Dennett and Humphrey are

apparently talking about.

They are saying that there is no show, there is only us thinking that we’re experiencing a show, and

this thinking is not qualia. The whole point of an illusion, Humphrey reminds us, is that you can’t tell

it from the real thing.22

Surely all this could have been cleared up by Dennett and Humphrey being just a little more explicit?

Instead, Humphrey muddies the waters by talking about the “magical mystery show” and Dennett

admits that we seem to have the experience of qualia. Neither of them is very clear in what they

say, which is infuriating when it is so unnecessary.

But that aside, if this is what they are really saying, does it actually work as an explanation of

consciousness and qualia? In response to the critics who are saying “if you’ve got an illusion, you’ve

got qualia” they appear to be saying “we’ve got an illusion, but it’s an illusion of an illusion, so it’s

not qualia”. Is this even coherent? Can you have something that ‘certainly seems real’ which is not

really real enough or ‘enough of a something’ to count as qualia?

If this is what they are saying, I don’t think they make the case clearly or strongly enough. And if it’s

not what they are saying, then the critics are right—their ‘illusions’ are still qualia. Let’s just be clear

about what it would mean to say that when you’re experiencing the colour ‘red’ you only think that

you’re experiencing ‘red’. They are essentially asking us to discount the qualitative, subjective

evidence of our own eyes, and accept as a matter of belief that despite that distinct ‘redness’ we

appear to be seeing, there is really nothing going on at all. It’s not just that they’re saying that the

20

Galen Strawson, ‘Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey – review’, The Observer, 9 January 2011,

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/09/soul-dust-nicholas-humphrey-review.

21 John Searle (1997), The Mystery of Consciousness, A New York Review of Books Book, p. 112.

22 See ‘The Mind’s Eye’, discussion between Nicholas Humphrey, Galen Strawson, David Malone and Shaun Ley

on the IAS Channel. http://iai.tv/video/the-minds-eye.

12

qualia ‘red’ that we see is not what we think it is (though they say this too)—they are saying that we

are not really experiencing it at all.

All this is derived, ultimately, from the ‘scientific’ starting position that subjective first-person

experience just cannot exist in a material world. This leads both Dennett and Humphrey to apply a

third-person descriptive methodology which, by definition, excludes the very thing they’re trying to

explain. Then surprise, surprise, they find no qualia, but that’s OK, because they didn’t think there

could be any qualia to find in the first place. Is this really ‘scientific’?

Of course, Dennett and Humphrey know full well how most people will react to being asked to

believe something that is so obviously contradicted by the plain evidence of our own senses. In fact,

they revel in putting forward a proposition that is so contrary to common sense and all of our

intuitions. It’s an illusion, they say, no wonder you’re in thrall to it. And more than that, they argue

that there are perfectly sound evolutionary reasons for why we have this illusion and why it seems

so real to us—it makes life worth living, you see.

As Humphrey says of the critics and their protestations:

“It’s all grist to my mill. Yet I only wish these commentators would see the joke’s on

them: that as evolved human beings they have been designed by Nature to consider

themselves special and transcendent, and thus to mock the opinions of any scientist

who dares point out they have no clothes. As I hope to have shown in the book, the

naked truth is still more interesting”.23

Here’s another problem I have with their argument: there is no way you could prove to yourself (or

anybody) that your qualia are just an illusion in their strong sense. There is no way you could tell the

difference between what Dennett and Humphrey say is happening and the alternative, common-

sense proposition, which is that you are actually experiencing something, even if it is a ‘magical

mystery show’ in your head. The two are indistinguishable.

Ironically, you have to take what Dennett and Humphrey say on faith in order to accept their

argument. They rely on an article of faith that there can be no subjective experience in a physical,

material world. I say this despite all the examples and scientific experiments they put forward. All

that ‘chipping away’ is not enough to prove the central contention. All it shows is that qualia are

indeed a ‘magical mystery show’ that your brain puts on inside your head. They can create doubts

about what it is that we really experience, but there is no decisive proof to the effect that we do not

experience anything at all.

I find it disturbing that good scientists and philosophers, in the name of ‘scientific method’, are

capable of reasoning their way to such ends. But don’t get me wrong, it’s something we are all more

than capable of doing. It’s a salutatory lesson in where our premises can lead us. In most cases,

scientific materialism is a welcome antidote to the metaphysics of the supernatural, but here, to the

extent that Dennett and Humphrey’s views are influential, we have intelligent, conscious beings

23

Nicholas Humphrey, comment in Mary Midgley, “Soul Dust by Nicholas Humphrey – review”,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/05/nicholas-humphrey-soul-dust-review .

13

choosing to believe that they are deluded, mechanical zombies. If such views are 21st Century

orthodoxy, then I think we are all the poorer for it.

Now, if instead of all this, we allow that our conscious experiences of qualia, though every bit a

‘magical mystery show’ in our brain, are real in the sense that we really are experiencing them, then

we are back to that expanded and more complicated world that Thomas Nagel spoke of. We are

back to a world in which the physical universe is not as austere as we might have thought it was.

And if we allow this possibility, what then are the ‘radical implications’?

To finish this discussion, after having been so critical of Dennett and Humphrey, it seems incumbent

on me to put my own views on the table. Interested parties can read my paper, Realist / Idealist. An

essay on life, meaning and purpose in a material world,24 but, in short, I believe consciousness is real

and irreducible, and I am not a dualist. My views are similar to those of John Searle: I believe

consciousness to be a natural biological product of brains.

To return to the two questions posed at the start of this paper, I believe that the emergence of

consciousness is too much to ask for in a material, physical world. As the geneticist Sewall Wright

put it: “Emergence of mind from no mind at all is sheer magic”.25 Consequently, like Galen Strawson,

I believe that there must be more than we think to the fundamental ‘stuff’ of the universe. There

must be something in the fundamental constituents of the universe that is prototypical of the

qualitative, subjective character of consciousness. This does not mean that I subscribe to

panpsychism in the strong sense. I do not think that thermostats, rivers or molecules are conscious.

But I do believe there is something in the underlying nature of energy that is consistent with the very

real experience of qualia.

The philosopher who, in my view, has come closest to putting their finger on what is going on here is

Arthur Schopenhauer with the ‘Will’ (though he really should have used a more neutral word, such

as ‘force’).26 And finally, although I am not religious, I believe Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was on the

right track when he said:

“Right at its base, the living world is constituted by consciousness clothed in flesh and

bone. From the biosphere to the species is nothing but an immense ramification of

psychism seeking for itself through different forms. That is where Ariadne’s thread

leads us if we follow it to the end.”27

24

Richard Sandlant, Realist / Idealist. An essay on life, meaning and purpose in a material world, July 2013.

http://independent.academia.edu/RichardSandlant.

25 Cited in Charles Birch (1995), Feelings, UNSW Press, p.68.

26 Arthur Schopenhauer, (1958 English edition), The World As Will And Representation, Dover Publications.

See also Bryan Magee (1997), Confessions of a Philosopher, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

27 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1955, 1980 edition), The Phenomenon of Man, Collins, p.167.