Bo102010 comments on Consciousness - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Mitchell_Porter 08 January 2010 12:18PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (221)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: RobinZ 11 January 2010 03:47:40AM 3 points [-]

Since Dennett takes care to deny that there is anything that is actually colored, even in the mind, and that there are only words, dispositions to classify, and so forth, he arguably wishes to deny even that there is a "color feeling", though it's hard to be sure.

Citation or he didn't say it. Daniel Dennett coined the phrase "greedy reductionism" - partially to emphasize that he does not deny the existence of color, consciousness, etc. Unless you know of some place where he reversed his position, I would argue that you have misinterpreted his remarks. My understanding is that his position is that color is an idiosyncratic property of the human visual perception system with no simple referent in physics, not no referent at all.

(I normally wouldn't make such a big deal of it, but Dennett is one of the major figures on the physicalist side of this debate, and a mischaracterization of his views impedes the ability of bystanders to perform a fair comparison.)

Comment author: Bo102010 11 January 2010 04:05:27AM *  0 points [-]

Upvoted. I searched Google for about 15 seconds looking for the quote and didn't find it, but I remember seeing or hearing Dennett say once how flabbergasted he is about being "oh yeah, that guy who thinks we don't see color."