Does he answer the question “why qualia, of any kind, ever?”

> Dennett most certainly tackles the "hard problem", by convincingly arguing the problem is ill-defined and not a real problem.

No, like everyone else he admits defeat before it and tries to define it away. Whatever the relationship between qualia and physical reality, we experience them (I do. Dennett might not, haha) which requires some explanation. Once you have that everything else is easy, but there’s no reason for there to be an experience at all.

I'm not a philosopher, but arguments for the hard problem always come off as very circular to me. And when I dig deeper, it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be"

Look, it certainly feels that way to me too. But that's not an argument. It's not even evidence. It also feels like it's impossible for me not to exist, and yet the evidence has me entirely convinced that will happen one day.

In any case, as a non-philosopher I can only gather that among philosophers, this is a highly contentious issue in philosophy of mind, and let the sides try to convince me.

When I read Dennett, he uses an immense breadth of knowledge on neural anatomy, computation, evolution, and cognitive psychology.

When I read arguments from the likes of Chalmers and Searle, I find highly contrived, seemingly circular thought experiments that are purposely constructed to purport their argument as fundamentally true. Feels more like theology to me.

> it essentially boils down to "but it sure feels like there are qualia, so there must be"

no. The argument is that "it feels like something to be me", and then to ask "how can it be possible to feel anything?"

qualia is a term from philosophy that is essentially a synonym for "having an experience" or "it is like something to be X"

nobody says "it feels like there are qualia". the closest would be "i have experience, and we call that qualia"

Yeah yeah, semantics. Snore.

How about an objective argument that isn't dependent on assuming its own conclusions and sneaky, poorly defined and impossible thought experiments?

It's like arguing with a religious person about the existence of god.

Where are you getting this? It’s not an argument, doesn’t have any conclusions and doesn’t require any though experiments. It is not semantics. Most attempts to dodge it are semantics though.

I made a point about the lack of philosophical consensus on this issue. And yes, the hard problem and also qualia depend on thought experiments like Mary's Room. When I dig past all the baroque philosophising all I find is philosophers not thinking objectively and instead being too misguided by their own experience.

Stop pretending the hard problem being a problem is some cut and dry thing. It simply is not.

And I'll generally side with the philosopher who understands more about how actual brains work, which is clearly Dennett.

Mary's room, The Chinese Room and friends seem designed around fundamental misunderstandings of how the brain, psychology and computation actually work.

They're designed to evoke a sort of visceral reaction. "Of course Mary won't understand what it's like to see red". But once you dig into the details of it, the logic breaks down.

I emailed Dennett after Consciousness Explained was published, and put the same point i make at the top of this subthread to him. "I suppose that in some real sense, you are right" was his reply.

If that's literally all he wrote, that sounds more like a polite way of saying "you're wrong, and I have better things to do than argue with you about it."

He wrote more than that. I no longer have emails from that period, so I can't quote his full reply. It was friendly, and seemed to engage with the point I was making.

Yea. "I suppose in some real sense"... What does that even mean?

That his book Consciousness Explained did not explain how there could be consciousness, but instead explained what we are conscious of. It's not that what the book does is not explaining consciousness, but it's only explaining it at a specific level, presupposing its existence and understandibility. Dennett was conceding that the explaining "the hard problem" was a real goal, and that his book did not tackle it.