No amount of clever engineering could endow a robot with qualia—but this is an empty victory, since there is no reason to believe such intrinsic properties exist. To see this, compare the qualia of experience to the value of money. Some naïve Americans seem to think that dollars, unlike euros and yen, have intrinsic value. The tourist in the cartoon asks, “How much is that in real money?” meaning how much is that in dollars. Every dollar, they declare, has something logically independent of the functional exchange powers it shares with all other currencies in circulation. A dollar has a certain je ne sais quoi. When you contemplate it, you can detect that it has an aura of value—less than in the olden days, perhaps, but still discernible: let’s call it the dollar’s vim (from the Latin, vis, meaning power). Officially, then, vim is the non-relational, non-dispositional, intrinsic economic value of a dollar. Pounds sterling and euros and the like have no intrinsic value—they are just symbolic stand-ins; they are redeemable for dollars, and hence have derived economic value, but they don’t have vim!
Vim is quite obviously a figment of the imagination, an artifact of the heartfelt hunches of those naïve Americans, and we can explain the artifact without honoring it.
Vitalism—the insistence that there is some big, mysterious extra ingredient in all living things, dubbed élan vital—turns out to have been a failure of imagination.
How do they distinguish their conviction from the mistake of the naïve Americans? (Or are the Americans right? Dollars do have vim, as anybody can just intuit!)
Source:
Philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Book Intuition Pumps
