It’s shared experience that gives our life meaning and substance. It seems like basically all indigenous peoples more connected to their environment seem to realize that. Splitting the consciousness outside of the self as it relates to others and the macro sphere seems to correlate highly with modern ideas of extraction, ultra individualism, and modern corporate capitalism.
Psychologist Jim Carpenter, who has practiced psychotherapy for many years, and has been involved in the parapsychological research community for just as long, came up, about 15 years ago, with a view of parapsychology which many of the field's leaders have said is the first that has made sense of a vast range of well replicated and validated parapsychological research.
he calls it "first sight" theory. This involves the recognition that we are all connect in a "psi field," and the so-called "external world" we perceive in which we take ourselves to be disconnected and separate, is a distortion resulting from extreme identification with the "little me" (the ultra individualism you refer to)
I like that you said "correlated" rather than caused by capitalism, etc. Jean Gebser traces the evolution of consciousness from thousands of years ago, and notes that toward the end of the medieval period, this sense of alienation, separation and hyper individualism was reaching a crescendo. It manifested in the raise of capitalism, of colonialist imperialism (which sought quite consciously to wipe out cultures in which the sense of deep, fundamental connection was still alive).
We see it at its extreme in the parodies of socialism so common today. There was a deeply moving article in the NY Times today by two congresspeople from Alaska (one a Republican and one an Independent) talking of the utter devastation that will occur socially and economically due to the "Big beautiful bill" being pushed through congress. Most of the comments were deeply empathic.
However, the ones that spoke of "socialism works until you run out of other people's money" and the need for "able bodied people" to work so they can pay their own way and not "depend on the government" were almost caricatures of this hyper individualistic, "all empathy is toxic," utterly alienated disconnected state of consciousness.
Gebser refers to this as the "Deficient" mode of the mental structure of consciousness, and Iain McGilchrist notes that this is very much characteristic of a kind of detached, narrow, selective attention which is the way the left hemisphere approaches experience, always with the aim of control and manipulation, rather than experience and connection.
It's very interesting to take this from the "other" end of things (which is not really an "other" and really doesn't involve "things" - but then, since this is fiction as well as philosophy, we already know that words can't capture Reality (though sometimes they may seem to improve on it!:>))
If there is a living, personal/impersonal, infinite, Reality, of which "we" are ourselves infinite lenses through which that Reality comes to know/feel/sense itSelf in infinite ways, then our personal "minds" POTENTIALLY provide direct, intimate knowledge of that Reality.
"Potentially" - because like the stick seemingly divided in water, every thing we sense, feel, think is filtered through this distorting lens of the "little me."
Virgil, a patient of Oliver Sachs who regained his vision at age 47, after living a life of total blindness from age 6, did not open his eyes to a given world. Rather, he saw a blurry mess of patches of light and dark that slowly congealed into the face of his surgeon. For weeks, even months after, he had to work immensely hard, moment to moment, to "figure out" that stairs were 3 dimensional (he kept knocking his feet on the 2nd step until he gained depth perception.
It seemed to him every time his dog changed direction, it was not the same but a different dog.
So Hume and Kant were about 1% right, and Whitehead is much closer but doesn't seem ever to connect to the Beingness of the Infinite Reality, of which he seems only to believe in Becoming. In the Indian tradition, Purusha (Being) and Prakriti (ever changing Nature) are two aspect of one Reality which is non-dual, not-two, neither changing or unchanging, which are merely words attempting to grasp the ungraspable.
But we can leave philosophy behind altogether and be with our experience. Feel the stillness, the substantiality (not "thingness) of the body, of the floor and ground and walls and of the arms and legs and torsos of those who surround you. Feel the silence between thoughts and the unbounded spaciousness all around you.
Notice the "sound" of thoughts and the "sounds" in the environment and notice there is no experienceable boundary between sounds "in" here and sounds "out there" (and this may give a radically different feel of the 3rd Century BC poet, Epimenides, who St Paul quoted in his description of God as that "in which we live and move and have our being."
And notice that in regard to every experience, there can be FELT a distinction between the form or object of experience (sights, sounds, sensations, feelings, instinctive attraction and repulsion, emotions, thoughts, images) and and awareness or consciousness of that. Look again and notice that ALL the content floats within the unbounded space of this consciousness - the still, silent, unbounded spaciousness of Purusha or Conscious-Being, and the dynamic, ever changing richness of infinite experience (Prakriti).
And then go deeper and "Feel" the sense of wonder, awe, mystery, majesty, beauty, Presence of something which cannot be captured at all by words, which is beyond Consciousness and Experience, beyond yet within subject and object, which is the simplest thing imaginable, only made complex by words and concepts, here always, now always, infinite in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour.
As William Blake put it, when a stereotypically phlegmatic Englishman said to him, "But surely Mr. Blake, when you look up at the sky you see a small round, golden disc about the size of a guinea."
"No, no, not at all," Billy Blake replied, "I see a host of heavenly angels singing 'Glory Glory Glory to God in heaven Hallelujah.
And he meant it, too!:
As Krishnaprem once put it, we tend to think of Apollo and other gods as symbols; Apollo, for example, as a symbol of the Sun.
But if we see rightly, actually, the Sun is a symbol of Apollo, just as a wooden door is a symbol of a moment of Brahman.
I agree with you about Hume and Kant, and I'm glad you pointed this out because I meant to say something about this...but then I forgot. It does seem to be fruitful to make a distinction between what is thought of as 'raw sense data' and ideas or 'eidos'. Blurry, unformed perceptions—such as those of the blind patient—are indeed real experiences. The mistake comes from taking for granted that those kinds of experiences are sense data that belong to or come from reality 'as it is in itself'. If anything, I think those experiences feel like less than reality.
To give you an example, I used to have terrible vision and started wearing glasses in the 1st grade. But my eyes got rapidly worse, so I had to wear hard contact lenses to slow this down. Before I got lasik surgery my final year of college, my vision was something like 20/450. Without glasses or contact lenses, the world was just blurry colored patches, and I had no depth perception because there wasn't enough definition to objects. Things were blurry even when I held them right in front of my face. Of course in my case it was very obvious that the blurriness of the world came from my terrible eyes, this was not sense data from some realm of things in themselves. It's entirely possible, though, that without enough experience of the world, very early perception in babies might be similar. In my case a fifteen minute surgery changed everything instantly. Once that corneal flap came down, I went from seeing blurry patches of color to seeing 20/15, better than normal. My new vision wasn't even comparable to wearing glasses or contact lenses; it felt like a miracle. On the ride home I marveled at all the individual leaves on trees, at how everything sparkled with clarity. I felt like I had been missing out on the world without realizing it. And this was after only one eye had been corrected.
But this is very different from "It seemed to him every time his dog changed direction, it was not the same but a different dog." Yikes.
"But if we see rightly, actually, the Sun is a symbol of Apollo, just as a wooden door is a symbol of a moment of Brahman."—Nice.
I do my best these days not to use the word "qualia", since it's usually not clear what people mean when they say it. If someone uses it with me, I'll do my best to pick out which version they mean from the context. But I've found I can almost always reply with other terms, and when I can't, it's typically because the version under discussion is the one Dennett described and that legions of philosophers insist is a strawman.
That seems like a good policy. The meanings of words are always on the move, of course, but the word qualia has become so contentious it hardly seems useful anymore. I get the sense that most people who talk of qualia really just mean "qualities", but you never know until you ask.
I take "qualia" and "qualities" to be synonymous, but also "properties" and "attributes". For me, the question for all of them is, qualities of what?
If the answer is "experience" or "consciousness", then it seems like we're right back to the initial issue. (As you point out, the original answer was "sense data", but that's no longer fashionable.) For me, it means the details of functionality, but it feels misleading to use those words that way.
I think the 'of what' is left up in the air, especially if 'qualia' can mean nothing more than 'qualities', but of course that depends on the context in which it's used and the intent of the person using it. So again, better to ask.
That said, I tend to think of 'qualities' as a less technical, less specialized word—I can talk about the qualities of, say, a coffee mug without specifying whether I believe those qualities (yellowness, roundness, etc.) belong to the mug or only to my perception of it. Normally—outside of discussions about metaphysics or science and such—we just mean the yellowness belongs to the mug. 'Bring me the yellow mug.' Not, 'Bring me the mug which I perceive as yellow.' But it starts to get awkward when we refer only to our own private experience of qualities. In the aftermath of the rise and fall of the primary and secondary qualities distinction, we're left asking, "Is there anything at all aside from (perceived) qualities?" The question has its roots in the primary/secondary qualities dichotomy, which morphed into the phenomena/noumena dichotomy, then retreated from that back to the safety of various scientific realisms, and now it's taking the shape of qualia vs. mathematical-physical-informational (entities?). This is how qualities end up becoming "qualia" that refer to private experiences or phenomenal consciousness.
I think you're right that the trouble starts with the PQ/SQ distinction. There's no reason to posit mental paint before it, when we thought red was red regardless of observer.
I actually don't think the distinction is completely wrong, but it seems more like the difference between perceptions where the physics is more obvious, and ones where it's a more complex story. We have to involve evolution and ecological niches to explain perceptions like red, sweet, or hot, where the exact same encounters by another species may lead to very different perceptions.
The early modern philosophers, like Galileo and Locke, didn't have the concept of evolution to work with yet, and so their ability to theorize about SQs was limited, hence the binary distinction. Maybe the mistake we make today is letting our imagination be too constrained by their initial models.
Unfortunately, though, science does posit mental paint by saying objects are not really red or any other color, but those colors exist only in our minds. This is the PQSQ distinction. I don't see how evolutionary theories help to bridge that ontological divide. It seems, looking back on the history of thought, we are now in the awkward position of needing to explain why mathematical formulas and scientific theories aren't themselves subjective too. How does our theory of evolution play a role in our evolution?
"Maybe the mistake we make today is letting our imagination be too constrained by their initial models."
On the evolutionary roles for SQ, consider that what we consider hot or cold seem pretty different from what a penguin or polar bear feel, whose sense of temperature is adjusted to their different ideal environment. Or our experience of sugar, which is delightfully sweet, but something a cat never experiences, representing the differences in our evolutionary background.
Colors long were puzzling, because they seemed more like PQs rather than other SQs, but it turns out they have a range of functional roles. I think salience estimation might be the most primitive. But what's salient for a primate looking for ripe fruit is going to be different from a mammal that gets most of its food from other sources, indicating why most mammals get by with only one color opponency scale rather than the two primates have.
So SQs could be thought of as a relationship between an organism's immediate environment and its evolutionary history. I'd say that means they aren't only mind dependent, but then our minds are also part of that relationship. It's just that "mind dependent" doesn't mean what we might initially take it to mean, as something separate from the world.
The project of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, in Hume's day and now, is to analyze mysterious things into primitive elements, in the hope of midwifing the next science. Qualia are proposed as primitive elements of perception, or experience, or whatever we have settled on as the basis of epistemology. In the green dots of your example, we supposedly experience only the various shades of green and surrounding white. We construct the rest -- whether the idea of shape and separation generally, or mathematical circles more precisely, or the very space and time by which we make sense of these primitives.
For those philosophers in the habit of identifying properties wherever possible, by way of further nascent science, qualia have the obvious properties of, say, greenness or whiteness. Whether those properties inhere in the thing perceived or arise in the perceiver is an interesting question, but one with a lot of philosophical baggage. If they inhere in the perceiver, then after suitable analysis they might be assigned such additional properties as ineffability, infallibility, privacy, and intrinsicality. But these are problematic, and for a philosopher like Dennett, their problematical nature makes nonsense of something -- either the idea of qualia, or of the philosophical baggage of perceiver and perceived. He would do away with the perceiver, at least as the kind of thing in which the properties of qualia arise -- and not just privacy and so on, but also the greenness or whiteness. But this is effectively to do away with qualia. Critics of Dennett might ask whether, by establishing that the property of ineffability is incoherent, he has also established that the original property of greenness is incoherent, or whether he has instead set up a strawman for knocking down the idea of qualia. I have read his _Quining Qualia_, and I have also read Quine's famous _Two Dogmas of Empiricism_, and in my opinion Dennett's invocation of Quine is unwarranted, not to say embarrassingly immodest.
Dennett proposes to get rid of half the philosophical baggage: the perceiver. But what are we to do about the perceived? Do greenness or whiteness inhere in them? Science says otherwise, and so those properties will have to go as well. This leaves us with nowhere at all to locate greenness and whiteness -- and yet, Dennett's protestations notwithstanding, there they are.
It seems that in dealing with the baggage of perceiver and perceived, it may not be enough to get rid of the perceiver, and in a spirit of realism, look to the perceived, only to be disappointed. If the baggage of perceiver and perceived is truly to be ditched, then the "perceived" must go also. The whole Cartesian model of subject and object must go. Some say that this is what Dennett was actually trying to do. Undoubtedly he was opposed to Cartesian dualism, but for me, the question is whether he really managed to transcend it, or whether his apparent commitment to the "external reality" of the conventional sciences betrayed a latent Cartesianism. I haven't read enough of him to judge, and perhaps I am straw-manning his position.
In any case, qualia were invented as epistemological primitives: the atoms from which all knowledge are constructed. In the process, other possible primitives were given short shrift. Space and time, for example, are on this basis understood as constructs, but perhaps they are experiential primitives. Perhaps form is an experiential primitive, as Goethe seemed to be arguing. But the project of analyzing things into primitives is an essentially scientific one, and the scientific project is an essentially objective one. When it comes to understanding subjectivity and intersubjectivity, we may be starting off on the wrong foot.
"But the project of analyzing things into primitives is an essentially scientific one, and the scientific project is an essentially objective one."
Well said. The lenses through which we view the world too often get overlooked, but they play a crucial role in what we'll see. Qualia are what you get when you want to see qualities through the lens of reductive analysis.
I'm with you on Dennett, although it sounds like you got much farther in the paper than I did. The rhetorical way he writes makes it hard for me to figure out what his position is. It's like he goes right up to the edge of making a point, but then retreats from it and makes another point, and on and on. I do think "fame in the brain" sounds like dualism, but more like a property dualism where consciousness is the emergent "user illusory" epiphenomenal byproduct—or "property"—of the brain. But I could be wrong.
It’s shared experience that gives our life meaning and substance. It seems like basically all indigenous peoples more connected to their environment seem to realize that. Splitting the consciousness outside of the self as it relates to others and the macro sphere seems to correlate highly with modern ideas of extraction, ultra individualism, and modern corporate capitalism.
Psychologist Jim Carpenter, who has practiced psychotherapy for many years, and has been involved in the parapsychological research community for just as long, came up, about 15 years ago, with a view of parapsychology which many of the field's leaders have said is the first that has made sense of a vast range of well replicated and validated parapsychological research.
he calls it "first sight" theory. This involves the recognition that we are all connect in a "psi field," and the so-called "external world" we perceive in which we take ourselves to be disconnected and separate, is a distortion resulting from extreme identification with the "little me" (the ultra individualism you refer to)
I like that you said "correlated" rather than caused by capitalism, etc. Jean Gebser traces the evolution of consciousness from thousands of years ago, and notes that toward the end of the medieval period, this sense of alienation, separation and hyper individualism was reaching a crescendo. It manifested in the raise of capitalism, of colonialist imperialism (which sought quite consciously to wipe out cultures in which the sense of deep, fundamental connection was still alive).
We see it at its extreme in the parodies of socialism so common today. There was a deeply moving article in the NY Times today by two congresspeople from Alaska (one a Republican and one an Independent) talking of the utter devastation that will occur socially and economically due to the "Big beautiful bill" being pushed through congress. Most of the comments were deeply empathic.
However, the ones that spoke of "socialism works until you run out of other people's money" and the need for "able bodied people" to work so they can pay their own way and not "depend on the government" were almost caricatures of this hyper individualistic, "all empathy is toxic," utterly alienated disconnected state of consciousness.
Gebser refers to this as the "Deficient" mode of the mental structure of consciousness, and Iain McGilchrist notes that this is very much characteristic of a kind of detached, narrow, selective attention which is the way the left hemisphere approaches experience, always with the aim of control and manipulation, rather than experience and connection.
Definitely!
It's very interesting to take this from the "other" end of things (which is not really an "other" and really doesn't involve "things" - but then, since this is fiction as well as philosophy, we already know that words can't capture Reality (though sometimes they may seem to improve on it!:>))
If there is a living, personal/impersonal, infinite, Reality, of which "we" are ourselves infinite lenses through which that Reality comes to know/feel/sense itSelf in infinite ways, then our personal "minds" POTENTIALLY provide direct, intimate knowledge of that Reality.
"Potentially" - because like the stick seemingly divided in water, every thing we sense, feel, think is filtered through this distorting lens of the "little me."
Virgil, a patient of Oliver Sachs who regained his vision at age 47, after living a life of total blindness from age 6, did not open his eyes to a given world. Rather, he saw a blurry mess of patches of light and dark that slowly congealed into the face of his surgeon. For weeks, even months after, he had to work immensely hard, moment to moment, to "figure out" that stairs were 3 dimensional (he kept knocking his feet on the 2nd step until he gained depth perception.
It seemed to him every time his dog changed direction, it was not the same but a different dog.
So Hume and Kant were about 1% right, and Whitehead is much closer but doesn't seem ever to connect to the Beingness of the Infinite Reality, of which he seems only to believe in Becoming. In the Indian tradition, Purusha (Being) and Prakriti (ever changing Nature) are two aspect of one Reality which is non-dual, not-two, neither changing or unchanging, which are merely words attempting to grasp the ungraspable.
But we can leave philosophy behind altogether and be with our experience. Feel the stillness, the substantiality (not "thingness) of the body, of the floor and ground and walls and of the arms and legs and torsos of those who surround you. Feel the silence between thoughts and the unbounded spaciousness all around you.
Notice the "sound" of thoughts and the "sounds" in the environment and notice there is no experienceable boundary between sounds "in" here and sounds "out there" (and this may give a radically different feel of the 3rd Century BC poet, Epimenides, who St Paul quoted in his description of God as that "in which we live and move and have our being."
And notice that in regard to every experience, there can be FELT a distinction between the form or object of experience (sights, sounds, sensations, feelings, instinctive attraction and repulsion, emotions, thoughts, images) and and awareness or consciousness of that. Look again and notice that ALL the content floats within the unbounded space of this consciousness - the still, silent, unbounded spaciousness of Purusha or Conscious-Being, and the dynamic, ever changing richness of infinite experience (Prakriti).
And then go deeper and "Feel" the sense of wonder, awe, mystery, majesty, beauty, Presence of something which cannot be captured at all by words, which is beyond Consciousness and Experience, beyond yet within subject and object, which is the simplest thing imaginable, only made complex by words and concepts, here always, now always, infinite in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour.
As William Blake put it, when a stereotypically phlegmatic Englishman said to him, "But surely Mr. Blake, when you look up at the sky you see a small round, golden disc about the size of a guinea."
"No, no, not at all," Billy Blake replied, "I see a host of heavenly angels singing 'Glory Glory Glory to God in heaven Hallelujah.
And he meant it, too!:
As Krishnaprem once put it, we tend to think of Apollo and other gods as symbols; Apollo, for example, as a symbol of the Sun.
But if we see rightly, actually, the Sun is a symbol of Apollo, just as a wooden door is a symbol of a moment of Brahman.
A lovely meditation this morning, thank you!
I agree with you about Hume and Kant, and I'm glad you pointed this out because I meant to say something about this...but then I forgot. It does seem to be fruitful to make a distinction between what is thought of as 'raw sense data' and ideas or 'eidos'. Blurry, unformed perceptions—such as those of the blind patient—are indeed real experiences. The mistake comes from taking for granted that those kinds of experiences are sense data that belong to or come from reality 'as it is in itself'. If anything, I think those experiences feel like less than reality.
To give you an example, I used to have terrible vision and started wearing glasses in the 1st grade. But my eyes got rapidly worse, so I had to wear hard contact lenses to slow this down. Before I got lasik surgery my final year of college, my vision was something like 20/450. Without glasses or contact lenses, the world was just blurry colored patches, and I had no depth perception because there wasn't enough definition to objects. Things were blurry even when I held them right in front of my face. Of course in my case it was very obvious that the blurriness of the world came from my terrible eyes, this was not sense data from some realm of things in themselves. It's entirely possible, though, that without enough experience of the world, very early perception in babies might be similar. In my case a fifteen minute surgery changed everything instantly. Once that corneal flap came down, I went from seeing blurry patches of color to seeing 20/15, better than normal. My new vision wasn't even comparable to wearing glasses or contact lenses; it felt like a miracle. On the ride home I marveled at all the individual leaves on trees, at how everything sparkled with clarity. I felt like I had been missing out on the world without realizing it. And this was after only one eye had been corrected.
But this is very different from "It seemed to him every time his dog changed direction, it was not the same but a different dog." Yikes.
"But if we see rightly, actually, the Sun is a symbol of Apollo, just as a wooden door is a symbol of a moment of Brahman."—Nice.
A beautiful evocation of the mysteries of experience. Lovely.
(sounds like good material for a story, too!)
I do my best these days not to use the word "qualia", since it's usually not clear what people mean when they say it. If someone uses it with me, I'll do my best to pick out which version they mean from the context. But I've found I can almost always reply with other terms, and when I can't, it's typically because the version under discussion is the one Dennett described and that legions of philosophers insist is a strawman.
That seems like a good policy. The meanings of words are always on the move, of course, but the word qualia has become so contentious it hardly seems useful anymore. I get the sense that most people who talk of qualia really just mean "qualities", but you never know until you ask.
I take "qualia" and "qualities" to be synonymous, but also "properties" and "attributes". For me, the question for all of them is, qualities of what?
If the answer is "experience" or "consciousness", then it seems like we're right back to the initial issue. (As you point out, the original answer was "sense data", but that's no longer fashionable.) For me, it means the details of functionality, but it feels misleading to use those words that way.
I think the 'of what' is left up in the air, especially if 'qualia' can mean nothing more than 'qualities', but of course that depends on the context in which it's used and the intent of the person using it. So again, better to ask.
That said, I tend to think of 'qualities' as a less technical, less specialized word—I can talk about the qualities of, say, a coffee mug without specifying whether I believe those qualities (yellowness, roundness, etc.) belong to the mug or only to my perception of it. Normally—outside of discussions about metaphysics or science and such—we just mean the yellowness belongs to the mug. 'Bring me the yellow mug.' Not, 'Bring me the mug which I perceive as yellow.' But it starts to get awkward when we refer only to our own private experience of qualities. In the aftermath of the rise and fall of the primary and secondary qualities distinction, we're left asking, "Is there anything at all aside from (perceived) qualities?" The question has its roots in the primary/secondary qualities dichotomy, which morphed into the phenomena/noumena dichotomy, then retreated from that back to the safety of various scientific realisms, and now it's taking the shape of qualia vs. mathematical-physical-informational (entities?). This is how qualities end up becoming "qualia" that refer to private experiences or phenomenal consciousness.
I think you're right that the trouble starts with the PQ/SQ distinction. There's no reason to posit mental paint before it, when we thought red was red regardless of observer.
I actually don't think the distinction is completely wrong, but it seems more like the difference between perceptions where the physics is more obvious, and ones where it's a more complex story. We have to involve evolution and ecological niches to explain perceptions like red, sweet, or hot, where the exact same encounters by another species may lead to very different perceptions.
The early modern philosophers, like Galileo and Locke, didn't have the concept of evolution to work with yet, and so their ability to theorize about SQs was limited, hence the binary distinction. Maybe the mistake we make today is letting our imagination be too constrained by their initial models.
Unfortunately, though, science does posit mental paint by saying objects are not really red or any other color, but those colors exist only in our minds. This is the PQSQ distinction. I don't see how evolutionary theories help to bridge that ontological divide. It seems, looking back on the history of thought, we are now in the awkward position of needing to explain why mathematical formulas and scientific theories aren't themselves subjective too. How does our theory of evolution play a role in our evolution?
"Maybe the mistake we make today is letting our imagination be too constrained by their initial models."
Agreed!
On the evolutionary roles for SQ, consider that what we consider hot or cold seem pretty different from what a penguin or polar bear feel, whose sense of temperature is adjusted to their different ideal environment. Or our experience of sugar, which is delightfully sweet, but something a cat never experiences, representing the differences in our evolutionary background.
Colors long were puzzling, because they seemed more like PQs rather than other SQs, but it turns out they have a range of functional roles. I think salience estimation might be the most primitive. But what's salient for a primate looking for ripe fruit is going to be different from a mammal that gets most of its food from other sources, indicating why most mammals get by with only one color opponency scale rather than the two primates have.
So SQs could be thought of as a relationship between an organism's immediate environment and its evolutionary history. I'd say that means they aren't only mind dependent, but then our minds are also part of that relationship. It's just that "mind dependent" doesn't mean what we might initially take it to mean, as something separate from the world.
The project of Anglo-Saxon philosophy, in Hume's day and now, is to analyze mysterious things into primitive elements, in the hope of midwifing the next science. Qualia are proposed as primitive elements of perception, or experience, or whatever we have settled on as the basis of epistemology. In the green dots of your example, we supposedly experience only the various shades of green and surrounding white. We construct the rest -- whether the idea of shape and separation generally, or mathematical circles more precisely, or the very space and time by which we make sense of these primitives.
For those philosophers in the habit of identifying properties wherever possible, by way of further nascent science, qualia have the obvious properties of, say, greenness or whiteness. Whether those properties inhere in the thing perceived or arise in the perceiver is an interesting question, but one with a lot of philosophical baggage. If they inhere in the perceiver, then after suitable analysis they might be assigned such additional properties as ineffability, infallibility, privacy, and intrinsicality. But these are problematic, and for a philosopher like Dennett, their problematical nature makes nonsense of something -- either the idea of qualia, or of the philosophical baggage of perceiver and perceived. He would do away with the perceiver, at least as the kind of thing in which the properties of qualia arise -- and not just privacy and so on, but also the greenness or whiteness. But this is effectively to do away with qualia. Critics of Dennett might ask whether, by establishing that the property of ineffability is incoherent, he has also established that the original property of greenness is incoherent, or whether he has instead set up a strawman for knocking down the idea of qualia. I have read his _Quining Qualia_, and I have also read Quine's famous _Two Dogmas of Empiricism_, and in my opinion Dennett's invocation of Quine is unwarranted, not to say embarrassingly immodest.
Dennett proposes to get rid of half the philosophical baggage: the perceiver. But what are we to do about the perceived? Do greenness or whiteness inhere in them? Science says otherwise, and so those properties will have to go as well. This leaves us with nowhere at all to locate greenness and whiteness -- and yet, Dennett's protestations notwithstanding, there they are.
It seems that in dealing with the baggage of perceiver and perceived, it may not be enough to get rid of the perceiver, and in a spirit of realism, look to the perceived, only to be disappointed. If the baggage of perceiver and perceived is truly to be ditched, then the "perceived" must go also. The whole Cartesian model of subject and object must go. Some say that this is what Dennett was actually trying to do. Undoubtedly he was opposed to Cartesian dualism, but for me, the question is whether he really managed to transcend it, or whether his apparent commitment to the "external reality" of the conventional sciences betrayed a latent Cartesianism. I haven't read enough of him to judge, and perhaps I am straw-manning his position.
In any case, qualia were invented as epistemological primitives: the atoms from which all knowledge are constructed. In the process, other possible primitives were given short shrift. Space and time, for example, are on this basis understood as constructs, but perhaps they are experiential primitives. Perhaps form is an experiential primitive, as Goethe seemed to be arguing. But the project of analyzing things into primitives is an essentially scientific one, and the scientific project is an essentially objective one. When it comes to understanding subjectivity and intersubjectivity, we may be starting off on the wrong foot.
"But the project of analyzing things into primitives is an essentially scientific one, and the scientific project is an essentially objective one."
Well said. The lenses through which we view the world too often get overlooked, but they play a crucial role in what we'll see. Qualia are what you get when you want to see qualities through the lens of reductive analysis.
I'm with you on Dennett, although it sounds like you got much farther in the paper than I did. The rhetorical way he writes makes it hard for me to figure out what his position is. It's like he goes right up to the edge of making a point, but then retreats from it and makes another point, and on and on. I do think "fame in the brain" sounds like dualism, but more like a property dualism where consciousness is the emergent "user illusory" epiphenomenal byproduct—or "property"—of the brain. But I could be wrong.