Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Before understanding Dennett’s Eliminative Materialism, it is important to understand in greater
detail what he is arguing against, namely qualia. Qualia are not well defined, but are very close to our
everyday understanding of our minds. As the Churchlands, who are Eliminative Materialists themselves,
state, qualia are “those intrinsic or monadic properties of our sensations discriminated by introspection,”
(Churchland 163) and as Dennett himself states, qualia are the “various properties of conscious experience.”
(Dennett 42). For example, the quale of pain is its hurtfulness; the quale of joy is the actual feeling and
conscious experiencing of happiness. In short, having qualia is having experiences; to experience something
(whether from external inputs such as physical pain, or internally such as emotions and the desire to
perform an action) and be conscious of that experience is to have qualia. Note that qualia cannot be easily
reduced, if at all, to physical phenomenon: there is no clearly physical substance of pain, pleasure, happiness
or sadness. Philosophers have attempted to form different theories saying these qualia are this brain process
or that, such as that pain is the firing of C-fibers in the brain, but not one of these theories is free of
devastating problems. Thus we are left with these odd and unexplained qualia, seemingly nonphysical but
also seeming to have an enormous causal effect on the physical world.
In the realm of science, this poses a great threat. One of the founding tenets of modern science is
that the physical world is a closed system—physical events must have a physical cause. This is called the
Causal Closure of the Physical. The problem for qualia is that while being non-physical things, they can play
no causal role in the physical world, yet it is clear that they do. For example, according to causal closure it
cannot be my wanting to stand up and walk around that causes the physical movements of my getting up
and walking around, although it would seem to be the case. Thus we see the seemingly contradictory nature
of qualia that is important in understanding Eliminative Materialism: qualia are vital to our understanding of
our minds interacting with the physical world, but there can be no such thing as a quale with physical causal
powers.
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