Topoi

DOI 10.1007/s11245-017-9508-2

A History of Qualia
Daniel C. Dennett1 

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Abstract  The philosophers’ concept of qualia is an artifact made on behalf of One True God. What could be more
of bad theorizing, and in particular, of failing to appreciate obvious? [2001, p. 1]
the distinction between the intentional object of a belief (for
What they are doing, pretty clearly, is availing them-
instance) and the cause(s) of that belief. Qualia, like Santa
selves of a familiar way of speaking and writing that is not
Claus and the Easter Bunny, have a history but that does not
so much “sociological” or “anthropological” as “literary”:
make them real. The cause of a hallucination, for instance,
A history of Odysseus or Paul Bunyan or Santa Claus could
may not resemble the intentional object hallucinated at all,
be an entirely creditable work of scholarship and explanation
and the representation in the brain is not rendered in special
written by someone who knew full well, and was happy to
subjective properties (qualia).
acknowledge, that their topic was a fictional character, not
a real person. When the topic is God, however, there is a
Keywords  Qualia · Intentional objects · Causes ·
long established tradition of eschewing that acknowledg-
Humphrey · Nicholas
ment, out of sincere agnosticism (perhaps, in a few cases) or
diplomacy or even fear of ostracism. We can highlight this
convenient and familiar silence by contrasting it with Dawk-
Several authors have written books about the history of God.
ins’ (2006) forthright—and shocking to many—description
Are they asserting the existence of God, or talking about the
of the God of the Old Testament as “the most unpleasant
idea of God or the concept of God? Or what? Karen Arm-
character in all fiction [my emphasis].”1 We know where
strong (1993), a former nun, published A History of God:
Dawkins stands. Jehovah, thank goodness, is just a fictional
The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in
character, not a real supernatural Lord and Master.
1993. It seems that she may be an atheist, but she doesn’t
When it comes to speaking and writing about qualia,
say. Rodney Stark (2001), a sociologist of religion, opens
there is a similar ambiguity, which I long ago attempted to
his 2001 book, One True God: Historical Consequences
expose, but my joking title, “Quining Qualia” (1984), appar-
of Monotheism with a passage that brandishes the same
ently misled many into thinking that I wasn’t really saying
ambiguity:
that qualia were as fictional as leprechauns (about which
All of the great monotheisms propose that their God books could be written, of course)—or if I really meant it,
works through history, and I plan to show that, at least I was obviously wrong. (“What could be more obvious?”)
sociologically, they are quite right: that a great deal
of history—triumphs as well as disasters—has been
1
  See Dan Barker’s (2016) detailed and scholarly book inspired by
it, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, which glee-
* Daniel C. Dennett fully cites the biblical verses supporting Dawkins’ verdict that this
Daniel.dennett@tufts.edu character is “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynis-
1
Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University, Medford, tic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
MA 02155, USA megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

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 D. C. Dennett

For more than 30 years philosophers and cognitive scientists What should we say, then, about the intentional objects
have continued to insist that they knew what they were talk- of normal, veridical beliefs and perceptions? Normally, if I
ing about when they talked about qualia, and knew that they believe there is a red apple on the table in front of me, my
were perfectly real. In fact, they often assert, it is the undeni- belief is caused by a red apple in front of me. The apple
able existence of qualia that makes the Hard Problem hard! exists, and is red, and is the indirect, distal cause of my
According to those who think this way, I wasn’t explaining belief. (It causes events in my eyes and visual cortex which
consciousness in 1991, I was trying to explain it away. Haha. cause me eventually to go into the mental state of believing
It is time to stop joking, and take this way of speaking seri- that there is a red apple in front of me.) That belief is not red
ously, and see how it can beguile very good thinkers (or their or round or juicy; it is about something red and round and
readers) into missing an opportunity to make real progress juicy. Nor are the proximal causes of that belief red or round
on consciousness. or juicy. The intentional object of the belief is a red apple in
I will use Nicholas Humphrey’s essay “The Invention of front of me, not the idea of a red apple in my mind, and this
Consciousness” (this issue) to demonstrate what I mean. I is a belief that I can express by speaking of that apple or by
agree with, and have been instructed by, most of what Hum- reaching out, grabbing it and taking a bite (while ignoring
phrey says in this essay. I may in fact agree with everything the unripe apple beside it, etc.). There is little harm in the
here except some of his expository tactics and choice of ordinary practice of simply identifying the intentional object
language, which I think court misunderstanding by being of a true belief, perception or other mental state with the real
overly diplomatic, giving illusory comfort to those whose object that plays the—typically indirect—stabilizing causal
views he is in fact subverting vigorously. role in the creation and maintenance of that mental state,
as long as we remember that when the intentional object is
fictional—non-existent, hallucinated, fantasized—there is
1 What are Intentional Objects Made of? no role for a substitute real object, an inner real object that
“has all the same properties” to be among the more proximal
The non-committal way of speaking exemplified by Arm- causes of the mental state. There is a role for a system of
strong and Stark is de rigueur when our topic is what Bren- stabilizing internal representations, but they represent the
tano (1874) called intentional objects. According to myth, properties of the fictional object in roughly the same way the
Ponce de Leon was searching for the Fountain of Youth— sentences of a novel represent the properties of a fictional
something that doesn’t exist. Since there is no known factual character. Seeing a real red apple for real does not require
basis for that myth, let’s consider a slightly less famous, the brain to render a “directly seen” phenomenal/subjective
but historically impeccable, case: Sir Walter Raleigh con- red apple that intervenes between the piece of fruit and the
ducted several expeditions in search of El Dorado, the city belief. Hallucinating a red apple doesn’t require an inner
of gold, in South America. One could write a book about rendering either.
El Dorado, full of scholarly truth, and never get around to I have learned that this is a very counter-intuitive idea
acknowledging to the reader that it doesn’t actually exist. for most people to accept. It sure seems that when one hal-
The book would be about real things—real people and real lucinates a red apple, this must involve the real existence (in
brains (or minds, if you like), real treks, real books and con- some “dimension” or “arena” that might not be physical) of
versations, real maps, real con artists and impostors, real something that is (in some perhaps special, subjective sense)
disappointments. And while it is true that Raleigh really red and round, an object created in the mind by whatever it is
had an idea in his mind of El Dorado (we might say, loosely that creates hallucinations. It is that object, that phenomenon
speaking), that mental state was not the object of his quest. that one is talking about when one talks about the contents
He already had it! He wasn’t seeking an idea in his mind; of one’s conscious experience. I am insisting that this is a
he was seeking a city. And what was El Dorado made of? mistake, not the indubitable deliverance of introspection and
Marble? Gold? Adobe? It—the intentional object—wasn’t reflection. What you are doing when you make this mistake
made of anything. A fictional object can be truly said to is confusing the intentional object of your belief with the
“have” plenty of properties—real properties: Santa’s coat is proximal cause of your belief. You are “authoritative” about
red, and his beard is white, and his belly is large and round the intentional object of your belief in the same way a nov-
(properties I have, too—except for the red coat). El Dorado elist is authoritative about the characters in her novel, but
“had” whatever real properties Raleigh believed it had; it you have precious little access to, or knowledge about, the
didn’t exist, but Raleigh was so convinced that it existed he proximal cause[s] of those beliefs.
was prepared to devote a large portion of his life to finding If asked why I say there is a red apple in front of me, I
it. This non-existent (“intentionally inexistent”) El Dorado can reply, sincerely, that I see it with my own eyes, right
was the intentional object of some of Sir Walter Raleigh’s now. That is a claim about causation. If I am right, then
most important beliefs and desires. there is in front of me a physical object with such-and-such

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A History of Qualia

physical properties, including the “lovely” property red 2 Where are the Qualia?
(Dennett 1991), a dispositional property that can only be
defined relative to a class of normal observers. But I might Qualia are the intentional objects of many of the reflective
be wrong; I might be hallucinating, for instance, or tricked or introspective beliefs that one may have about one’s own
by a parabolic mirror, something I could discover on my mental states. What could be more obvious? In that tone
own for reaching out for the apple. So while we are usually of voice, talking about intentional objects, it is clear that
right in our beliefs about what is causing our other beliefs people do think about, talk about, wonder about, delight in,
(and our beliefs about our beliefs, etc.), we have no “privi- … their qualia. It is just as undeniable a fact as the fact that
leged access” that guarantees the truth of such beliefs about Sir Walter Raleigh was searching for El Dorado. What is not
causes. And if you believe that your belief that there is a obvious is that qualia are real, that qualia exist. If they are
red apple in front of you is proximally caused by a “phe- not real, they pose no more challenge to Modern Science
nomenal” red apple-representation produced by your visual than Raleigh’s El Dorado. The Hard Problem (Chalmers
system to be the immediate source of your belief, you may 1995, 1996) would turn out to be no problem at all, or rather,
well be mistaken. (I am sure you are, but it is my goal in this it would disintegrate (as I have long urged) into a host of
paper to show you that I might be right, so I won’t assume “easy” problems about how people could be seduced into
that I am right from the outset.) Sir Walter Raleigh’s stable, thinking that their qualia were real, which will require us to
highly developed, obsessed-about beliefs about El Dorado ask, and answer, a host of questions about what is actually
were not caused by a real city of gold. We can be quite happening in people’s brains that makes them carry on as
sure of that. Who knows what tangled network of folklore, they do.
deception, wishful thinking, and even indigestion may be Isn’t this “behavioristic”? Yes, in the very bland and non-
implicated? [Recall Ebenezer Scrooge’s address to the cause ideological sense that all science is behavioristic. Meteorol-
of his current vision of Marley’s ghost: “You may be an ogy is behavioristic in this sense: once you’ve explained all
undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, the meteorological behavior, you’ve explained all the phe-
a fragment of an underdone potato.” (Dickens 1843)]2. nomena. The “behavior” in this formulation includes every-
What was in Raleigh’s head that anchored, proximally thing that happens in the brain, described at every level that
caused, subserved, … the beliefs and desires he had about is useful, including whatever modulates emotional states,
this El Dorado? Here we must tread carefully, because while generates preferences, raises or lowers thresholds, turns on
the actual physical, causal goings-on in his brain were noth- orientation responses, triggers memory retrievals, adjusts
ing Raleigh had any beliefs about—unless he was an ama- judgments, obtunds pains, distracts attention, heightens
teur cognitive neuroscientist centuries ahead of his time—he libido or aggression or submissive responses, along with
had, no doubt, plenty of beliefs about his “ideas” about El whatever processes drive and guide the production of verbal
Dorado, his yearnings for it, his anticipatory imaginings of reactions, either to oneself or to others, fully articulated or
it, and so on. To say he had access to all these “ideas” is to half-fleshed out with actual words.
say that, without any extensive amateur cognitive neurosci- Consider my favorite metaphorical depiction of con-
ence he could distinguish, report, describe them in quite sciousness, Saul Steinberg’s New Yorker cover depicting
stable fashion. That is, he had beliefs about these apparent the man looking at the painting he takes to be by Braque (It
inner happenings that could guide his further actions, includ- can be found on the cover of Dennett 2005). This virtuosic
ing reports about them (expressive of those beliefs). These thought balloon is an incomplete catalogue of the sequence
beliefs had their own intentional objects, of course, and, as of behaviors that might occur in a few seconds while he
before, he was incorrigible—the ultimate authority—about peruses the painting. They are not musculo-skeletal behav-
the properties “had” by those intentional objects, but he was iors but internal, covert behaviors, and the one property they
not incorrigible about which of these intentional objects, share that elevates them into the catalogue, beating out the
if any, were real, and which had causes that were not at all competition of all the other cognitive-emotional-metabolic
what he would expect them to be. behaviors occurring inside the man’s skull, is that they are
“accessible” to the man, and indirectly to us, since he can
report them, comment on them, describe them, and so forth,
according to the heterophenomenological protocol (Dennett
1991).
Here is where the footing gets slippery. In order for these
internal behaviors, these things happening in the brain, to
occupy this status of accessibility, they must be the reliable
2
 See my “How and why does consciousness seem the way it causes, shapers, modulators of the beliefs he expresses when
seems?” (2015) for further development of related points. he tells us what it’s like to be him at this time. But these

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 D. C. Dennett

internal things are not to be identified with the intentional 1991). But how could such an impersonal, boring pattern
objects of those beliefs since the intentional objects of those of neural firing take the place of a glorious, life-affirming,
beliefs may be fictions, as unreal as Santa Claus (who is not glowing, heart-breakingly lovely subjective patch of blue?
the cause of anybody’s beliefs about Santa Claus, by virtue By coming equipped with many of the triggers that initiate
of having the debilitating property of non-existence). This positive affective responses, dispositions to wax poetical,
is the heart of Illusionism (Frankish 2016; Dennett 2016). confidence-boosters, and so forth. (The difference between
It is one thing to identify the red round apple that causes imagining the shade of blue and actually seeing the shade
my belief that there is a red round apple present as both of blue is, in my opinion, a matter of degree, not kind. More
the distal cause and the intentional object of that belief; it is on this below.) The affect is built in, a feature of the rep-
another thing to identify the internal neural state that causes resentations designed by evolution to accompany the mere
my belief that that I am currently experiencing a red quale identification of the surface property involved. (Evolution
conjoined with a round quale as both the intentional object doesn’t have to smear the representations with jam to make
and the proximal cause of that belief, because that cause is them yummy, or douse them with vinegar to make them
neither red nor round, we can be sure of that. yucky; their sequelae are those that are the apt reactions to
We could claim this identity if we were willing to adopt the yummy or yucky properties they represent.)
a certain tendentious attitude, like the attitude of the Freud-
ian critic who insists that the evil female character in the
author’s novel is really the author’s mother, much as the 3 Nicholas Humphrey’s Inventions
author might deny it. The critic thinks that it is no coinci-
dence that the fictional character and the author’s mother Now we are ready to see how Humphrey makes these
share a variety of characteristics, and that this somehow points—for I think he agrees with almost all that I have just
explains—causally explains—some of the content present said, if not with my ways of putting it. He begins by noting
in the author’s novel. In fact, the case for identifying the two different meanings of “invention”—a device or process,
internal neural cause of a belief with the intentional object or a “falsehood, designed to please or persuade”: He then
of that belief might be rather more compelling than the case claims that “consciousness is an ‘invention’ in both these
of the psychoanalyzed novelist since a lot of circumstantial senses.” (Humphrey 2017).
evidence would support the identity in spite of the huge dif-
That is to say, consciousness is:
ference in properties. An example: I invite you to imagine a
1. A cognitive faculty, evolved by natural selection,
bright blue capital “A” against a black background, and you
designed to help us make sense of ourselves and our
comply. I tell you that the “A” you then tell me about—it’s
surroundings.
in a serif font, and the blue is October-sky blue, not baby
blue—is actually no more blue than its representation in this
But, on another level, consciousness is:
Word file is blue. It might, however, actually be (if you squint
2. A fantasy, conjured up by the brain, designed to
right and look in the right place with your cerebroscope)
change how we value our existence.
A-shaped! That is, the internal neural representation of the
capital A—the actual proximal cause of your introspective Exactly, on both counts. As I have put it (Dennett 1991,
belief that you are imagining a capital A—might indeed 2016, 2017), consciousness is a user-illusion, a brilliant sim-
avail itself of something along the lines of a retinotopic plification of the noisy tumult of causation and interaction
map, which would involve a real roughly A-shaped pattern (at the molecular and cellular levels, for instance) that needs
of real excitation in some part of your visual cortex! Using to be prudently and swiftly sampled in order for a brain to
spatial properties to represent spatial properties is sometimes do its work of controlling a large complex body through a
a very good trick, but whether this trick is being used by challenging, changing world. Consciousness is the brain’s
your brain is an open, empirical question about which you user-illusion of itself, or more accurately, it is a whole mani-
have no privileged access whatever. See, e.g., the Shepard/ fold of user-illusions for various components of the brain
Kosslyn/Pylyshyn debate over mental imagery for more on that have various different jobs of discrimination and control
this. Pylyshyn (2002) (including the commentary) is a good to accomplish. When we banish the homunculus from the
overview. And what neurally represents the blue? Some pat- Cartesian Theater and blow up the theater, the distributed,
tern of firings that links the representation of the A shape scattered agencies that do all the work need ways of passing
with a host of dispositions, memories, preferences, affective information and influence around. This involves not trans-
responses, gathered together as your neural representation ducing the informative events (the signals, if you will) into
of that shade of sky-blue. Something like that is the natural- a different medium, the imagined MEdium of consciousness,
istic surrogate for the dualistic phantom blue-quale that we but translating or transforming the signals into neural repre-
tend to imagine on display in the Cartesian Theater (Dennett sentations that are well-suited to permit representation-users

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A History of Qualia

to extract what they need. (See the lengthy description and this is a mature and intermittent achievement, not part of the
discussion of this translation process in Shakey, the early underlying operating system of the mind.
robot, in Dennett 1991.) But when I say qualia are playing these important causal
But, on further examination, what about the second roles, I mean, of course, the internal, proximal causes of the
sense? What fantasy is Humphrey talking about? One beliefs expressed by introspectors when they tell us what it
might think he was talking about the menagerie of inten- is like. Sensations have qualia the way El Dorado was made
tional objects that populates our waking life, the “things” we of gold. And perhaps this is what Humphrey means when he
think about, savor, yearn for, are repulsed by. Some of these says qualia make little contribution to the cognitive faculty:
intentional objects are perfectly real things in the world—red most of the contributions that matter are made—are at least
apples and frightful tigers and awesome sunsets—and some set in motion—before any articulation of the narrative into a
are mere figments of imagination, which are not made of drama. “Unfelt pains” suffered while asleep still manage to
“figment” any more than Sherlock Holmes is made of “fic- keep our limbs in good positions to avoid joint damage, and
toplasm.” But in fact he is talking about a more restricted set an adrenaline rush is initiated by limbic fear-discrimination
of intentional objects: the “things” we savor or hate “more well before there is an intentional object of the fear in the
directly” (it seems) when we direct our attention inward and subject’s conscious experience.
have beliefs about, premonitions about, yearnings for par- Now we get to a problem paragraph:
ticular sensations, those inner goings-on that accompany,
No one would or could wish qualia out of existence.
modify, enrich many if not all of our perceptual beliefs and
Indeed there will have been times for all of us when
desires. Humphrey says.
conscious experience is about little else. A science of
the fantasy I’m talking about is the kitchen-garden consciousness that leaves qualia out is not just ignor-
of qualia-soaked intentional objects that make up the ing the elephant in the room, it is ignoring the elephant
subjective world of sensation, and nothing else. … that is the room. (Humphrey 2017)
Perceptions, as such, don’t have a qualia-dimension,
But of course I, for one, do wish qualia out of existence!
it’s not like anything to perceive there’s an apple that
That is, my attitude towards qualia is exactly the same as
is red. But sensations almost always do have it, it is like
my attitude towards Sherlock Holmes, the Loch Ness Mon-
something to sense red light on my retina. (personal
ster and the Abominable Snowman: I’m delighted that these
communication, 2017)
intentional objects are a topic of folklore, entertaining and
I think this resurrects a division between pragmatic, busi- instructive for many purposes, but I really don’t want any-
nesslike cognition and ecstatic, emotion-laden affect that has body to believe they are real. If they do, they are suffering
outlived whatever usefulness it ever had. Humphrey says in from a delusion that might bring them to harm. (Belief in
his essay (this volume) “I’ll argue that qualia make little if qualia, in contrast, is fairly innocuous, perhaps at worst an
any contribution to the cognitive faculty. However they lie at embarrassing delusion to suffer, especially if one is a cogni-
the very heart of the fantasy.” I, in contrast, think qualia—in tive scientist convinced that those damn qualia are sneaking
the sense I think Humphrey could adopt quite comfortably— away, untrapped and untaxonomized, leaving an awful hole
play a huge role in cognition “proper.” We can see the sorts in one’s model.)3
of contribution they make in such minimal phenomena as Note that I am not denying the existence of the per-
the utility of color-coding in diagrams (which exploits the ceptual properties of things in the world: colors, sounds,
visual system’s competence and appetite for color discrimi- aromas, textures, liquidity and solidity and the like, any
nation), or rhyming mnemonics (which exploits the auditory more than I am denying the existence of dollars, pounds
system’s talent at detecting and insatiable desire for aural sterling or euros. These are real things in the world, as
patterns). I share Humphrey’s admiration for the brain’s real as real can be, and they are not properties of mental
inveterate valancing of well nigh all its inputs, approving events but properties represented by mental events. And
some stimulus arrays with an A+ or B−, while branding unlike many other properties (roughly, what Boyle and
others as D− at best, and flunking still others. Indeed it was Locke called the primary properties) these “secondary”
Humphrey who first opened my eyes to this perspective.
When we see the brain as never indifferent about what is
going on in it, we begin to get a sense of how control of 3
  I am always amused by cognitive scientists working on conscious-
mental life actually happens: by competition and coalition ness who modestly aver that they are not trying to solve the Hard
among valenced (“emotional”) neural activities. There is no Problem, something they are content to postpone indefinitely. If they
boss in the brain figuring out what to think about next. There think qualia are real, they should be ashamed of such abdication of
scientific duty, or at least chagrinned to admit they are not tackling
is sometimes a virtual boss, suppressing some thoughts and the important issues. But maybe this is just a convenient temporizing
working hard to concentrate on others, but as we all know, move, waiting for philosophers to get their act together.

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 D. C. Dennett

properties owe their very existence and identity to their Here he leaps without comment over qualia as an inter-
being represented by mental events. Hume aptly drew our vening (real) variable in the path from retina to report, a
attention to the mind’s “great propensity to spread itself good sign of his appreciation that he doesn’t need qualia to
on external objects” (Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, I, be real properties of events in the brain (or mind) in order
xiv) but this wonderful expression wears its metaphorical to inquire, appropriately, what might be the evolutionary
intent on its sleeve; Hume was not making the preposter- reason for qualia-beliefs to be caused in our minds. Then
ous suggestion that minds somehow projected colors onto he accurately skewers both Fodor and Searle, who make
the near surfaces of objects, for instance, in the manner the defining mistake of qualia Realists. They are like the
of some spectral lighthouse beam. A more sympathetic (one presumes imaginary) critics of Sir Walter Raleigh
reading of Hume’s insight is that the mind has a propensity who could manage to marvel at how Raleigh could ever
to treat objects in the world as having properties that are be driven to such lengths by something—El Dorado—that
nicely attuned to the needs and predilections of the mind’s didn’t even exist. Not a mystery. But then I come to a turn
owner, affordances, as Gibson (1966, 1979) would say. in Humphrey’s argument that perplexed me at first:
Affordances are real properties, ubiquitously instantiated
How does exposure to qualia change people’s psy-
in the world, and minds are good at detecting them. (See
chology? What beliefs and attitudes are generated?
Dennett 2015, 2017, for extensive discussions of this.)
How does it affect people’s ideas about who and what
But because they are identified or defined in terms of the
they are, and what kind of world they live in? (Hum-
proclivities of (normal) minds of one species or another—
phrey 2017)
usually us H. sapiens—they can be identified as examples
of the benign illusions of our evolved user-illusion. His phrase “exposure to qualia” must be unpacked care-
Here is a riddle: how are red things like opportunities? fully. Frankish (2016, p. 29) finds a reading that Humphrey
And the answer is that red things in the world depend for endorses:
their redness on things that happen in our heads, but not
Humphrey proposes that sensations occur when
red things that happen in our heads; likewise opportunities
internalized evaluative responses to stimuli (‘senti-
wouldn’t be opportunities if it weren’t for things that happen
tions’) interact with incoming sensory signals to cre-
in our heads, but those things aren’t opportunities! (See Den-
ate complex feedback loops, which, when internally
nett 1991, pp. 379–380, on lovely and suspect properties.)
monitored, seem to possess otherworldly, phenom-
Humphrey does not want to be a Realist about qualia,
enal properties.
but has his qualms about Illusionism. “Illusionism under-
mines—and in many people’s eyes devalues—the mystery It is the internal monitoring of those feedback loops,
of human experience.” (Humphrey 2017) That is not, I creating higher-order beliefs about what is going on inside
think, a weighty objection; I can conjure up circumstances oneself, that generates the fantastic intentional objects.
in which I would want to preserve a holy lie, a sacred, “By lifting sensory experience onto that mysterious, non-
life-saving (or at least life-enhancing) falsehood that I physical plane, qualia deepen and enrich your sense of
would want to promulgate paternalistically, but I don’t your own presence. You find yourself living in thick time.”
think embracing the shocking truth about the unreality of (Humphrey 2017).
qualia should be any more unsettling than giving up belief I am not persuaded. I think Humphrey has built in a
in Nessie or yetis or mermaids. After all, “qualia” is a gratuitous step, perhaps an improvement on the standard
“technical” term devised by philosophers, and its unmask- naïve line about qualia, but still one step too many. Sir
ing should be no more distressing than the loss of the ether Walter Raleigh was, apparently, living in thick time, with
or centrifugal force. Colors will still be real and ravishing, a deep and rich sense of his quest, and it certainly didn’t
aromas will still haunt our memories, pains will still be owe anything to any beliefs of his about El Dorado being
abhorrent, and the ubiquitous quest for orgasms will dwarf fairy land or made of ectoplasm or anything like that; he
Sir Walter Raleigh’s famous obsession. thought it was real and made of real gold. The human fas-
Humphrey, after noting in passing that Stan Dehaene cination with gold is itself a fine topic for research; unlike
“oddly enough, is something of a ‘qualia denier’”(Humphrey our love of honey, for instance, it does not have a direct
2017) deftly avoids qualia Realism himself: and obvious evolutionary rationale. But I don’t think any
doctrines of immateriality play a role in gold’s psychologi-
Even if we were to know in detail how a conscious
cal importance to us. I similarly have not been convinced
experience is created neuron by neuron, from red
by Humphrey that belief in immateriality, or paradoxical
light touching the retina through to the subject making
“impossibility,” plays a role in persuading us to care about
claims about [my emphasis] red qualia, we still would
our lives and how we live them. This is how he puts it:
not know what this is good for. (Humphrey 2017)

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A History of Qualia

Even though it’s your own brain that creates the qualia, merely thought-about A can be very sketchy; we may not
you can’t but project the special qualities of sensations bother settling on a font or a particular shade of blue and
[my emphasis] out onto the objects of perception in the still sincerely maintain that we did indeed think about a blue
outside world. In doing so, you spread a kind of fairy- capital A on a black background. The imagined A must be
dust around you. You enchant the world. Take away maintained, deliberately, with some effort, but is readily
this magic paintbrush, and the world would lose much transformed in color or shape by “an act of will” (of which
of its significance. You’d find it a less awesome place, we have no deeper knowledge). The hallucinated A is quite
less fun, less promising. (Humphrey 2017) persistent, but tends to depart under any serious scrutiny.
(Doubting Thomas knew what he was doing.) The seen A is
We may think our sensations have “special qualities” but
robust under almost all conditions of further investigation.
in fact, I am claiming, our sensations (considered as events
Importantly, there can be penumbral cases in which one is
in our brains) are better seen as representing, not having,
unsure for some period of time which category of intentional
special qualities—affordances—of things in the world. Sen-
object one is attending to. That’s an important part of what
sations, considered as intentional objects, not the causes of
we know “from the inside” and it does not include anything
our beliefs in sensations, are wonderfully useful illusions.
about qualia, except as the unmagical properties of the inten-
“Projecting” those qualities must mean endowing the things
tional objects we are thinking about.
in the world with those properties, skewed as they are in
This strongly suggests that the human brain can be stim-
favor of their user-friendliness to us. Things in the world
ulated to generate representations that vary hugely in the
really do have those wonderful (or awful, or boring or excit-
amount of recoverable, “accessible” detail they invoke. It
ing, …) qualities, a fact as much about us as about them.
is close to impossible for anything other than a red, round
Those properties are not properties of conscious states;
apple to sustain the information-requiring investigation that
they are properties of things in the world of which we are
is possible in principle, and unless we are in a funhouse
conscious. And when we wax introspective and direct our
or other bizarre environment, we take the testimony of our
attention to “things” happening in us—Humphrey’s senti-
senses at face value. Hallucinations work (when they do)
tions—we find “them” to be sensations with qualia, a useful
because they are rare; someone who trips regularly on LSD
illusion we can learn to set aside, much as we set aside the
is not fooled by the hallucinations, enchanting though they
illusion of centrifugal force.
may be. The dividing line between imagining and halluci-
Finally, Enoch Lambert has raised a shrewd diagnosis of
nating is also vague; listening to some blowhard at a party
my difficulties convincing people about my line on inten-
and suddenly becoming transfixed by his resemblance to a
tional objects:
braying donkey, a conviction that you cannot shake and that
“not all intentional objects are created equal” … There interferes with your ability to follow the conversation, is
is a huge difference between the intentional object rep- not quite a hallucination, but close. And even at the sparser
resented by Raleigh’s pronouncements of his inten- levels of detail, such representations can have their affec-
tions to find El Dorado and, say, Raleigh’s hallucina- tive effects, and sometimes these effects are amplified, not
tion of “seeing” El Dorado in the valley below at the obtunded, by their displacement from reality. Some people
end of an exhausting journey. People think there are are more aroused by pornography than by engagement in
obvious psychological differences here and want to real sex, which, one supposes, may involve too much infor-
explain them via properties of the representations [my mation about one’s circumstances. So I just got you to think
emphasis]. (Personal correspondence, 2017) about sex, but reflecting on that sentence probably does not
arouse you; being provoked by it to engage in a sexual fan-
Yes, and people are not wrong to look to the properties
tasy is another matter.
of the representations, but they typically look in the wrong
Now back to Lambert’s example. That Raleigh believes
place for those properties! The properties that explain this
in El Dorado and is searching for it, and utters questions and
huge and obvious difference are functional/causal proper-
assertions and imperatives that refer to it, etc., is plenty of
ties of the embedding of those neural representations in the
grounding for an intentional object: Raleigh’s El Dorado,
brain, not the magical properties of qualia. We can creep up
which may differ substantially from somebody else’s El
on Lambert’s nice case of Raleigh’s hallucination by look-
Dorado (the way Santa Claus differs from Père Noël). When
ing first at simpler cases. What are the differences between
Raleigh hallucinates his quest at the end of a long day, he
thinking about a blue capital A on a black background, going
may well “discover” things about El Dorado that had never
to the trouble of imagining one, hallucinating one, and actu-
occurred to him: the city is smaller than he had imagined,
ally seeing one? In each case we have an intentional object,
the roofs are tiled with terra cotta, not gold, and there is a
but we also have rough and ready ways of distinguishing
giant statue of Queen Elizabeth I in the central square! But
them without any help from cognitive neuroscientists. The
now what might happen? He might rush back to his base

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 D. C. Dennett

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