Phenomenology
Dennett’s Heterophenomenology
Consciousness Studied as Reports and Beliefs About Experience
Daniel Dennett proposes a third-person method for the science of consciousness: treat subjects' sincere reports as data about what they believe their experience is like, while withholding any assumption that those beliefs are true of an inner reality. The subject is the authority on how things seem, and no authority on whether the seeming answers to anything real. The task then becomes explaining why the brain produces exactly those reports, which sets the method against the whole phenomenological tradition.
Daniel Dennett
What consciousness is
As a method, heterophenomenology identifies the data of consciousness science with a subject's beliefs and reports about experience, the subject's ‘heterophenomenological world’. In Dennett's wider program, the apparent rich phenomenal interior is a belief-state to be explained, not a store of intrinsic qualia.
Mind and body
Within Dennett's materialism, conscious seemings are products of brain processes, explained by asking what in the brain and its history generates a subject's beliefs about experience.
Mechanism
Third-person bracketing, which Dennett modeled on Husserl's epoché: take the subject as seriously as possible as a reporter while suspending commitment to the truth of what is reported.
Core claims
- Subjects are authoritative about how things seem to them but not about whether things are as they seem.
- The method is neutral between theories of consciousness, which Dennett calls ‘the beginning of a science of consciousness and not the end’.
- Once all third-person data, verbal reports included, are explained, nothing remains to explain.
- Dennett challenged critics to name a single experiment that goes beyond the heterophenomenological method, arguing that a first-person science would have no methods, data, or results.
Criticisms
Dan Zahavi argues the method attacks a straw man, since classical phenomenology never claimed infallibility, and that its neutrality slides into metaphysical minimalism that denies experience its reality. Max Velmans and David Carr argue it either collapses into something phenomenologists accept or begs the question by treating experience as fiction. David Chalmers holds that a complete science must explain first-person data as well.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Likely
- Since the evidence for consciousness is a system's reports and the processes that produce them, nothing in principle rules out an artificial system that produces them the same way. This follows from Dennett's functionalist program, not from the method alone.
- Survival beyond death: No
- On Dennett's materialism, conscious seemings are products of brain processes and end with them.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- Dennett's naturalism and atheism leave no room for cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Possible
- If what matters is the functional organization producing a person's beliefs and reports, reproducing that organization would in principle reproduce the person's heterophenomenological world.
Related theories
- Dennett’s Illusionism (Compatible)
- Dennett's Multiple Drafts Model (Compatible)
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness (Contrast)
- Varela's Neurophenomenology (Contrast)
Sources
- Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett (1991)
- The fantasy of first-person science, Daniel C. Dennett (2001)
- Who's on first? Heterophenomenology explained, Daniel C. Dennett (2003)
- Heterophenomenology reconsidered, Daniel C. Dennett (2007)
- Killing the straw man: Dennett and phenomenology, Dan Zahavi (2007)
- Heterophenomenology versus critical phenomenology, Max Velmans (2007)
- Facing up to the problem of consciousness, David J. Chalmers (1995)
- Dennett’s Heterophenomenology, Landscape of Consciousness (Closer To Truth)