According to Nagel, “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable”. In his essay What is it like to be a bat?, Nagel explores this theme and explains the special sort of problem consciousness poses for objective descriptions and why a standard physicalist reduction will not work. He uses bats as an example of a subjective experience that cannot be understood outside of its specific point of view. Dennett takes aim at Nagel’s view of the problem of consciousness and attempts to show there is nothing special about these experiences or “Qualia”. His objections, while having some truth, ultimately conflate judgments about the conscious experience with the conscious experiences themselves. Nagel begins by outlining his …show more content…
Well, Godel’s incompleteness theorem can shed some light on this. Skipping over the monumental proof, this theorem shows exactly the possibility of unknowable truths. The theorem essentially embeds the Epimenides paradox (this sentence is false) into the heart of number theory through a special encoding process called Gödel numbering. The exact process by which this is done is far too complex for these pages, but the end result is a true numerical statement, G, that translates to “this statement is not provable inside this formal system”. There are two possibilities here. First, that G is, in fact, a theorem. However, if it is a theorem it must present a truth, and in this case, that truth is its own nontheoremhood. Alternatively, G could be a nontheorem. This is appealing as it doesn’t cause a contradiction, but then it would be a true statement, and thus there is a true statement outside the bounds of the formal system.
Now, the point of this strangely esoteric digression is that it holds severe implications for one of the way Dennett attempts to attack the Nagel’s argument, but before getting there I must start at the beginning. In his paper Quining Qualia, Dennett aims to “deny resolutely the existence or importance of something real or significant”, namely our notion of qualia. He defines qualia as the way things seem to us, but goes on to say that, “‘qualia’ is a philosopher’s term which fosters nothing but confusion, and refers in the end to no properties or features at