As an aside, Chu spaces also provide a semantics for linear logic and are useful in understanding concurrency.
Not even remotely. I'm not even sure how you could possibly form such a conclusion, except by some deep misunderstanding of all of the various materialist arguments that discuss qualia. Dennett is himself a materialist by the way.
Materialism can classify qualia as an illusion while still recognizing that some reduction of qualia to physical laws is needed. This reduction would be left to the domain of science though, because that's where it would belong.
That's right, it's an illusion, in the sense that we perceive ourselves to have some irreducible subjectivity, but we actually don't.
> But when pressed enough, then he retreats to a just barely reasonable stance that's closer to Chalmers than the stances he spends most of his time communicating.
I'd like to see a citation for that, because as far as I've seen, Dennett hasn't changed his stance on this subject in over 20 years, and he's been very straightforward about his position in every interview I've watched or read.
And what he thinks is quite clear: he's a straight up materialist. Qualia don't actually exist as some irreducible phenomenon and consciousness is an illusion. He's published multiple books on the subject arguing for this position quite forcefully.
But can it? To say something is an illusion is to say that is really an experience of something else. And qualia are qualitative experiences, so the claim is that certain experiences are not experiences… which is problematic. Of course, a proper argument needs to be fleshed out more than that, but eliminativists face a real difficulty, unless they broaden the definition of materialism (which would take us closer to Aristotle).
"Selves" and zombies also crop up in these conversations, but they are neither here nor there. We're talking about the existence of things like "redness". Talk of "selves" is no doubt related to the Cartesian identification of mind and self, but something that is entirely irrelevant to the question at hand.
Funny how you keep calling materialism "absurd" and "incoherent", yet provide no coherent argument of your own to support this position. If anyone unfamiliar with this subject is reading this thread, rest assured that the anti-materialist sentiments espoused here are a minority view. A recent survey of academic philosophers found that the majority support a materialist philosophy of mind, so frankly, these charges of incoherency and absurdity don't pass a lay person's basic sniff test.
As for the existence of "redness" specifically, I can easily point out how the various thought experiments that allegedly support the existence of redness are fallacious. So instead of making further bold claims, would you care to present such an argument for scrutiny?
> Of course, if it is an illusion, then it still exists as an illusion, hence the incoherence of eliminativist materialism.
A car is also an illusion under materialism. But clearly I drove something to work this morning. So does this apparent incongruity entail some incoherency in materialism? Or is the problem really that you're attacking a straw man?
Your definition for "illusion" begs the question by simply assuming a subject is needed, ie. an "I" must experience an illusion. Rather, an illusion is simply describing the relation between perception and truth. If a perception, taken at face value, entails a false conclusion, then it's an illusion.
Even the basic dictionary definitions of illusion make no reference to a subject. They're all of the form of "a false idea or belief", or "a deceptive appearance or impression". Beliefs and appearances are attributes we can ascribe to mechanistic systems too, like computers, which can have sensors plugged into Bayesian inference engines that can infer false "beliefs".
So requiring a subject is a property that you have imposed on the meaning of illusion, it's not intrinsic to it.
> Any attempt to eliminate qualia or self or intentionality, etc. as being fundamental realities runs into the problem that all these things are more fundamental to my understanding than any proposed alternative.
1. Perception is fundamental to understanding. Whether experience is fundamental is very questionable.
2. Being fundamental doesn't entail something is irreducible. Being in a car is fundamental to driving on a road, that doesn't entail cars are irreducible.
Dualism comes in a variety of forms. Examples include property dualism (Searle, though he denies it) and panpsychism (Chalmers, it seems). Regardless of the version expounded, all such dualisms divorce the mental from the physical, hence the dead horses that are the so-called mind-body problem or the problem of qualia. On this view of matter, we can't account for things like color because, by definition, matter does not have color in the way that we commonly understand it as having color. Physical theories, instead of explaining color, redefine color in other terms. The only place left to locate color, as it is commonly understood, is the mind that's been so brutally split off from matter. Fun fact: Cartesian dualism is not a "religious residue". It is a philosophical position. In its lingering incarnation, we can credit Descartes through whose work it bears an interesting relation to the development of modern empirical science. Prior to Cartesianism, Aristotelian views were dominant. Indeed, while the Roman Catholic Church does not have an "official" metaphysical doctrine (metaphysics is philosophical, not theological or doctrinal), the preferred metaphysical theoretical apparatus has been Aristotelian since Aquinas. No such dualism exists in Aristotle or Aquinas.
On the other hand, eliminativism manages to take an even whackier view of things than dualism. Whereas dualism has painted itself into a corner by refusing to reexamine its suppositions, eliminativism "resolves" the problem by shutting its eyes, that is, by denying the existence of those things it must explain. As a result, it is an incoherent position.
What's interesting is that Dennett does distinguish between "function" and "intention", though I'm not entirely sure how he reconciles (if he does at all) all of these with materialism. The reason I draw attention to this point is that teleology/final causality is frequently misunderstood owing to a confusion between conscious intent and function. When an Aristotelian talks about the "purpose" of an organ, he has in mind what the organ is ordered and organized toward, not what intelligent design theorists would describe as "design". (Interestingly, ID theories are also rooted in Cartesian ideas about matter and thus need to appeal to imposed, extrinsic divine intent to locate and explain the function of things like organs. Their scientistic (not scientific) opponents take the eliminativist approach and deny that organs have functions at all because they hold to the same concept of matter as ID theories while rejecting that divine intent exists. On the other hand, Aristotelianism maintains the intrinsic finality of things like organs and thus does not need to appeal to some externally imposed divine intent to explain function as such.)