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Daniel Dennett was a reductionist; he argued that the mind is entirely physical and can be reduced to the physical world. In one his lectures, he spoke about the colors on the American flag and argued that subjective experience of red (redness) doesn't exist objectively, only subjectively.

I find this argument problematic and incompatible with reductionism.

If the subjective experience of the color red (a mental phenomenon) is actually a physical phenomenon, the interaction of light, eyes, brain and so on, then it must exist in space and time. Why? Because everything physical exists in space and time, including light, brain, eyes and human body. That's what being physical means.

If the subjective experience of the color red is equal to the interaction of light, eyes and brain, then it is completely objective and must exist in the physical world because light, eyes and brain also exist in the physical world.

So, if we say that the subjective experience of red exists only subjectively, and not objectively, that goes against reductionism. Reductionism says that subjectivity must be reduced to objectivity.

I'm not sure what am I missing. Can you help me understand how Dennett's philosophy of mind address his own example about experiencing colors?

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  • We are all watching the movie. Is it real? Does it exist? You can argue about it, but you cannot know with confidence.
    – TheMatrix Equation-balance
    Commented Jun 1 at 14:54
  • Suppose I lay out fifty-eight rocks before you, and I’ve grouped them in twenty-nine pairs. Does your experience of the evenness of the rock collection’s cardinality exist in the physical world? How about if I add one more rock; does your experience of the new cardinality’s primeness exist in the physical world?
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented Jun 2 at 2:32
  • Under physicalism, subjective experiences are physical phenomena only in extension, in intension, i.e. the way we happen to mean them, they need not be. For example, rainbows are objective optical phenomena, but experiences of them as flamboyant bridges leading to pots of gold are subjective. Similarly, Superman is Clark Kent in extension, but not in Lois Lane's intension.
    – Conifold
    Commented Jun 2 at 3:43

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First, Dennett might better be called an material eliminativist. From WP:

The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland, and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett, Georges Rey, and Jacy Reese Anthis.

You say:

If the subjective experience of the color red (a mental phenomenon) is actually a physical phenomenon, the interaction of light, eyes, brain and so on, then it must exist in space and time. Why? Because everything physical exists in space and time, including light, brain, eyes and human body. That's what being physical means.

Mental representations do not exist spatiotemporally in the third person; only the media that carry them do. This is "if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?" territory. According to a typical argument, there are atmospheric disturbances, but the brain is somehow connected to constructing and providing subjective qualia that are supplied by auditory perception. There is physical sound and experiential sound, and you can have one without the other. A completely deaf person is incapable of having auditory perceptions, and a schizophrenic who has auditory hallucinations has auditory perceptions and where no physical sound exists.

In reductionism, one often hears the language supervenience, dependence, and grounding (SEP), so it's important to understand a bit about the terminology. From the article:

The core idea of supervenience is captured by the slogan, “there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference.” It is important to notice the word ‘cannot’. Supervenience claims do not merely say that it just so happens that there is no A-difference without a B-difference; they say that there cannot be one. A-properties supervene on B-properties if and only if a difference in A-properties requires a difference in B-properties—or, equivalently, if and only if exact similarity with respect to B-properties guarantees exact similarity with respect to A-properties.

This in no way implies that A and B are of the same thing. If A is objective and physical and B is subjective and mental, changes in A not only correlate to changes in B, but necessitate them in some sense. There is no claim inherent to the idea that the mental reduces to the physical that says, the mental is in some way COMPOSED of the physical. And that's where your presumptions seem to lie. It sounds as if you believe that if an auditory experience starts with physical sound, and reduces to physical sound, it is composed in some sense of physical sound. That is not a view you can attribute to reduction.

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  • > Mental representations do not exist spatiotemporally in the third person; only the media that carry them do. What does "carry them" mean? Mental representations must be physical, that's reductionism. Mind is the brain. Therefore, if brain exists in the objective world, so should the mind. Why? Because mind is nothing more than the brain and body. Nothing more. Saying that redness exists subjectively, but not objectively seems to be to be incompatible with reductionism. It's saying that redness isn't in fact reducible to physical. If reductionism is true, redness must exist objectively
    – Dario Mirić
    Commented Jun 1 at 17:23
  • I'm by no means an expert and could be misunderstanding something. However, I have been studying Dennett's work for a while and can't really completely grasp his point in this aspect of his philosophy.
    – Dario Mirić
    Commented Jun 1 at 17:23
  • Why should redness exist subjectively? Because subjetive experience of red is EM waves of certain wavelength exciting optical cones in the eye. These are converted to the optical signals which go to the back of the brain to be processed and interpreted. That's all we have in materialist toolbox. This is subjective experience of red. Since all these phenomena are objective, so should redness be since redness is exactly that. There is nothing more to it.
    – Dario Mirić
    Commented Jun 1 at 17:30
  • If one claims there is, he is rejecting reductionism. We can then talk about strong emergence or some non-materialist theory of consciousness.
    – Dario Mirić
    Commented Jun 1 at 17:31
  • The mind is not the brain. The mind, in some way, reduces to the brain. That's a very important distinction. The mind is mental, and the brain is physical, and these are NOT the same. The question is, how do they relate because they are NOT the same. What exactly that relationship is a central preoccupation of philosophers. Descartes posited substance dualism. Chalmers backs property dualism. Dennett at his peak advocated eliminativism borrowing from Ryle's notion of Cartesian theater...
    – J D
    Commented Jun 1 at 19:26

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