Unbelievable

Is it possible that there are true propositions that we are incapable of believing?

I don’t see why not.  If we are information processing machines, it’s reasonable to assume that we come hard-code with assumptions or modes of thought that we are not capable of stepping away from.  So it seems reasonable that there are propositions that we are not capable of believing.  We could call these the “unbelievable” propositions.  We can hope that most of the unbelievable propositions are actually false, but maybe some of them are true.  We could call these propositions the “unbelievably true” propositions.

If there are unbelievably true propositions, we will never be able to identify what they are.  To identify an unbelievably true proposition, we would have to realize that it is true, which is impossible by definition.

Therefore, if you can prove that some proposition P is unbelievable, that’s almost as good as proving it false.  It might be true, but if it were, it would do us no good, since we couldn’t beleive it anyway.

What does all of this have to do with heterophenomenology?  Maybe nothing.  See, however, an interesting passage from the heterophenomenlogy chapter in Consciousness Explained: “People undoubtedly do believe that they have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, and these facts -- the facts about what people believe, and report when they express their beliefs -- are phenomena that any scientific theory of the mind must account for.” (Page 98)

What does Dennett mean when he says “people undoubtedly believe that they have mental images...and all the rest”?  Does he mean:

Everyone necessarily believes that he has mental images and all the rest
Most people currently happen to believe that they have mental images and all the rest

Undoubtedly, Dennett doesn’t mean #1.  After all, the question of whether people “have mental images and all the rest” is exactly what heterophenomenologists are supposed to remain “agnostic” about.  So if we are going to be good heterophenomenologists, which Dennett seems to think that all sensible people can be without too much trouble, we are required to not believe that people have mental images and all the rest (and, of course, not to believe the negation, which would be that people do not have mental images and all the rest).

So Dennett must mean #2.  The belief that people have mental images and all the rest must be a hunch, similar to what Dennett calls “the zombic hunch”, that will soon experience (so to speak) “the death of an illusion” (see the title of Sweet Dreams, Chapter 1).  We could call it “the phenomenological hunch”.  As Dennett writes at the end of Chapter 1:

I anticipate a day when philosophers and scientists and laypersons will chuckle over the fossil traces of our earlier bafflement about consciousness: "It still seems as if these mechanistic theories of consciousness leave something out, but of course that's an illusion. They do, in fact, explain everything about consciousness that needs explanation."

Does Dennett also anticipate a day when philosophers, scientists and laypersons will chuckle about our earlier confusion about experiences?  Will they say something like, “It still seems as if we have mental images, pains, perceptual experiences, and all the rest, but of course that’s an illusion”?

Is that all?  Is Dennett’s science of mind about nothing more than explaining the mistaken beliefs of some people?