Why I am not a Third Person, Part 1: Loading the Dice

Chapter 4 of Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett is called “A Method for Phenomenology”.  The essence of Dennett’s method is “the third-person perspective”.

The “third-person perspective” forbids the philosopher from drawing any conclusions from his own subjective experience.  The idea is to study phenomenology by listening to people’s reports of their experience, and treat those reports as data to be accounted for, or explained.

Dennett’s third person perspective sounds clean and disciplined, but there’s something funny about it.  Third person philosophy takes people’s accounts of their phenomenology and asks the following question: “Are the subjects actually experiencing the states of mind that they report, or are they storytelling machines who are designed to generate stories about states of mind?”

Once you ask the question that way, the answer is obvious.  Option 2  is quite plausible (as long as you ignore the fact that you are experiencing similar states of mind).  It’s consistent with our ideas about physics and computer science.  It’s tidy and coherent.  Option 1, on the other hand, seems to raise troubling questions.

As Dennett puts it in Section 4.6, “Isn’t it unimaginable that scientists might discover neurophysiological phenomena that just were the items celebrated by subjects in their heterophenomenologies?”  This is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that materialism is incompatible with the idea that people are actually experiencing what they say they are experiencing; which is equivalent to saying that materialism is incompatible with the idea that I am actually experiencing what I “seem” to be experiencing.

Once you have chosen option 2, all that is left is to haggle over the price, that is, to explain why the designer (e.g. God and/or natural selection), would have designed people to appear conscious when they are actually not conscious.  This is an inherently speculative task, and it’s not surprising that an imaginative person can come up with a compelling answer that’s hard to argue with.

If the materialist can convince the dualist to take the third-person perspective, the dualist has not just agreed to play in the materialist’s court, he has essentially conceded defeat.  The third person perspective is not just a method, it’s a solution.  It solves the problem simply by refusing to consider the problem.