Conscious-state Anti-realism

! Philosophical discussions of phenomenal consciousness are often cast in the idiom of realism/anti-realism debates. See, for example the “phenomenal realism” discussed by Chalmers (2003), Block (2002), and McLaughlin (2003) as well as the “qualia realism” discussed by Kind (2001), Graham and Horgan (2008), and Hatfield (2007). Often, the realists label themselves as such in the interest of making an existence claim and casting their opponents as those nihilists or eliminativists who would deny the existence of phenomenal consciousness and/or qualia. For example, critics of Daniel Dennett often characterize him as denying the very existence of consciousness.1 But, at least sometimes, there is more being claimed by the realists than the mere existence of consciousness: They are claiming that what exists also exists independently. (Independently of what? More on this shortly.) It’s open, then, for a consciousness anti-realist to affirm the existence of consciousness while denying that its existence is independent in a way interesting to realism/anti-realism debaters. My aim in the present paper is to explore such an existence-affirming consciousness anti-realism, especially as exemplified in Daniel Dennett's career-spanning work on consciousness, key components of which of course include his books Content and Consciousness (1969) as well as Consciousness Explained (1991b), and Sweet Dreams (2005). ! What sense can be made of independence in the context of discussions about consciousness? In other realism debates—debates, for instance, about numbers, colors, or physical objects—independence claims are often cast in terms of mind-independence (Khlentzos 2011). A realist about electrons holds that electrons would still have existed even if no minds did. A realist about colors holds that an object can have a color even if no mind exists to perceive its color. While formulations of independence claims along such lines may make sense for colors and physical objects, they may initially seem ill-suited for making coherent independence claims about phenomenal consciousness. It makes little sense to say that consciousness could have existed even if no minds existed. It makes little sense to say that qualia exist independently of how things are perceived or experienced. Despite the inapplicability of 1