Chapter
Seventeen
The view from within?
seems to us. Dennett suspects that ‘when we claim to be just using our powers of
inner observation, we are always actually engaging in a sort of impromptu theoriz-
ing’ (1991, p. 67). This view is a precursor of more recent illusionist approaches to
consciousness (Chapter 3). We are always creating fictions about our experiences,
and it is only these fictions that a science of consciousness must explain.
According to Dennett (2001b), the B teamers fall for the ‘Zombic Hunch’: the
hunch that there could be a creature physically and behaviourally indistinguish-
able from you but ‘all dark inside’. He says of Chalmers:
He insists that he just knows that the A team leaves out consciousness.
It doesn’t address what Chalmers calls the Hard Problem. How does he
know? He says he just does. He has a gut intuition, something he has
sometimes called ‘direct experience’. I know the intuition well. I can feel it
myself. [. . .] I feel it, but I don’t credit it.For Dennett, then, falling for the zombic hunch is like going on crediting the intu-
ition that living things have some kind of extra spark to them, or that the sun goes
round the earth. So he asks, ‘do you want to join me in leaping over the Zombic
Hunch, or do you want to stay put, transfixed by this intuition that won’t budge?’
(2001b). He is optimistic that some time in the next century people will look back
on this era and marvel that we could not accept ‘the obvious verdict about the
Zombic Hunch: it is an illusion’ (2005, p. 22), and chuckle over the ‘fossil traces’
of today’s bafflement about consciousness. For these future thinkers, it may still
seem as though mechanistic theories of consciousness leave something out, but
they will accept that, like the sun rising, this is an illusion. As for the zombic hunch,
‘If you are patient and open minded, it will pass’ (p. 23).
‘First-person science of
consciousness [. . .] will
remain a fantasy’(Dennett, 2001b)PRACTICE 17.1
IS THERE MORE IN MY PHENOMENAL
CONSCIOUSNESS THAN I CAN ACCESS?Here is a task relevant to the distinction between P-consciousness and
A-consciousness (Block, 1995, Chapter 2): is there more in conscious
experience than can be accessed? This looks like a question for first-person
inquiry because only you know the answer; you must look into your own
experience to see whether there is more there than you can convey to
anyone else or even describe to yourself.
You might like to look out of the window at a complex scene, take it all in
consciously, and then try to access parts of it, for example by describing to
yourself the objects you see, or counting the number of trees or people in
the scene. Do you get the sense that when you access some parts of your
experience, others disappear or become unavailable?
This exercise may have some strange effects. Try to get used to doing
it before you consider the more intellectual question: can this first-person
exercise tell us anything useful for a science of consciousness?