Reading group: Nagel’s bat, Chalmers’s hard problem and Dennett’s case against qualia
I write formal-verification tools for a living, and I like threads where the argument can be pinned down. Consciousness is the place where that's hardest, so let's read three short classics together, in the order that shows the debate developing.
Week 1. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (The Philosophical Review, 1974). About fifteen pages. Focus on the claim that an organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be it, and on his argument that physicalism, though perhaps true, is something we can't yet understand.
Week 2. David Chalmers, "Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness" (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995). The paper that drew the line between the easy problems and the hard one. Note how much of it is about what an answer would even look like.
Week 3. Daniel Dennett, "Quining Qualia" (1988). His argument that the concept of qualia, as philosophers define it, is incoherent. Read his "intuition pumps" carefully; the two coffee tasters are the heart of it.
All three are easy to find. I'd like each of us to say, by the end, which of the three moved us most and why. I'll start with a confession: I came in thinking Dennett was obviously right, and I'm no longer sure.