FWIW, I’m confused about Dennett’s current position on animal consciousness. Still, my impression is that he does attribute consciousness to many other animals, but believes that human consciousness is importantly unique because of language and introspection.
In this panel discussion, Dennett seemed confident that chickens and octopuses are conscious, directly answering that they are without reservation, and yes on bees after hesitating, but acknowledging their sophisticated capacities and going back to gradualism and whether what they do “deserves to be called consciousness at all”.
Some other recent writing by him or about his views:
But Dennett thinks these things are like evolution, essentially gradualist, without hard borders. The obvious answer to the question of whether animals have selves is that they sort of have them. He loves the phrase “sort of.” Picture the brain, he often says, as a collection of subsystems that “sort of” know, think, decide, and feel. These layers build up, incrementally, to the real thing. Animals have fewer mental layers than people—in particular, they lack language, which Dennett believes endows human mental life with its complexity and texture—but this doesn’t make them zombies. It just means that they “sort of” have consciousness, as measured by human standards.
To appreciate what I see to be Chalmers’ second contribution, we first need to distinguish two different illusions: the malignant theorists’ illusion and the benign user illusion. Chalmers almost does that. He asserts: ‘To generate the hard problem of consciousness, all we need is the basic fact that there is something it is like to be us’ (2018, p. 49). No, all we need is the fact that we think there is something it is like to be us. Dogs presumably do not think there is something it is like to be them, even if there is. It is not that a dog thinks there isn’t anything it is like to be a dog; the dog is not a theorist at all, and hence does not suffer from the theorists’ illusion. The hard problem and meta-problem are only problems for us humans, and mainly just for those of us humans who are particularly reflective. In other words, dogs aren’t bothered or botherable by problem intuitions. Dogs — and, for that matter, clams and ticks and bacteria — do enjoy (or at any rate do not suffer from) a sort of user illusion: they are equipped to discriminate and track only some of the properties in their environment.
I have long stressed the fact that human consciousness is vastly different from the consciousness of any other species, such as apes, dolphins, and dogs, and this “human exceptionalism” has been met with little favor by my fellow consciousness theorists. Yes, of course, human beings, thanks to language, can do all sorts of things with their consciousness that their language-less cousin species cannot, but still, goes the common complaint, I have pushed my claims into extreme versions that are objectionable, and even offensive. Not wanting to stir up more resistance than necessary to my view, I have on occasion strategically soft-pedaled my claims, allowing animals to be heterophenomenological subjects (of sorts) thanks to their capacity to inform experimenters (if not tell them), but now, my thinking clarified by Rosenthal’s, I want to recant that boundary blurring and re-emphasize the differences, which I think Rosenthal may underestimate as well. “Thoughts are expressible in speech,” he writes (p. 155), but what about the higher-order thoughts of conscious animals? Are they? They are not expressed in speech, and I submit that it is a kind of wishful thinking to fill the minds of our dogs with thoughts of that sophistication. So I express my gratitude to Rosenthal for his clarifying account by paying him back with a challenge: how would he establish that non-speaking animals have higher-order thoughts worthy of the name? Or does he agree with me that the anchoring concept of consciousness, human consciousness, is hugely richer than animal consciousness on just this dimension?
Maybe that is right. Dennett is often quite slippery (I think he believes that precision actually makes philosophy worse a lot of the time.)
He also just may have changed his position. The SEP article on Animal Consciousness at one point refers to ‘Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans)’, but the reference is to a paper from 1995. Looking at the first page of the paper they cite, I think it was the one I vaguely remembered as “Dennett denies animal consciousness for Yudkowsky-like reasons”. But having skimmed some of the paper again, I found it hard to tell this time if the reading of it as flat-out denying that animals are conscious was right. It seemed like Dennett *might* just be saying “we don’t know, but it’s not obvious, and for some animals, there probably isn’t even a fact of the matter”. (This is basically my view too, I think, except that unlike Dennett I don’t think this much damages the case for animal rights.) But even that is inconsistent with “anyone who thinks mammals aren’t conscious is totally out-of-step with experts in the field, I think.” And it’s possible the stronger reading of Dennett as actually denying animal consciousness is correct: I only skimmed it, and the SEP thinks so.
FWIW, I’m confused about Dennett’s current position on animal consciousness. Still, my impression is that he does attribute consciousness to many other animals, but believes that human consciousness is importantly unique because of language and introspection.
In this panel discussion, Dennett seemed confident that chickens and octopuses are conscious, directly answering that they are without reservation, and yes on bees after hesitating, but acknowledging their sophisticated capacities and going back to gradualism and whether what they do “deserves to be called consciousness at all”.
Some other recent writing by him or about his views:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennetts-science-of-the-soul
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2019/00000026/f0020009/art00004
https://davidrosenthal.org/Dennett-on-Seeming-to-Seem.pdf
Maybe that is right. Dennett is often quite slippery (I think he believes that precision actually makes philosophy worse a lot of the time.)
He also just may have changed his position. The SEP article on Animal Consciousness at one point refers to ‘Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans)’, but the reference is to a paper from 1995. Looking at the first page of the paper they cite, I think it was the one I vaguely remembered as “Dennett denies animal consciousness for Yudkowsky-like reasons”. But having skimmed some of the paper again, I found it hard to tell this time if the reading of it as flat-out denying that animals are conscious was right. It seemed like Dennett *might* just be saying “we don’t know, but it’s not obvious, and for some animals, there probably isn’t even a fact of the matter”. (This is basically my view too, I think, except that unlike Dennett I don’t think this much damages the case for animal rights.) But even that is inconsistent with “anyone who thinks mammals aren’t conscious is totally out-of-step with experts in the field, I think.” And it’s possible the stronger reading of Dennett as actually denying animal consciousness is correct: I only skimmed it, and the SEP thinks so.