That is an excellent analogy. Perhaps "emergent property" would be a better term for both, but even that phrase doesn't quite capture the true spirit of Dennett's argument. It's not just the consciousness is emergent, it's that its true nature is actually very different from what we think it is.
And yet, given some time interval, all threads do make progress within that interval (assuming its not too small of course). So if by multitasking we mean that execution of multiple threads progresses over time, then multitasking on a single CPU is real. The point is that one's perspective is relevant to what's correctly taken as real.
But what is the perspective of neural circuitry's acquaintance with neural circuitry? I don't know, but I know its not like our third person acquaintance with neural circuitry. And so saying phenomenal experience is an illusion of neural circuitry (and thus not real) is a mistake. It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan.
You're correct, it's more correct to say it's an illusion of parallelism. On human timescales the parallelism appears real but it's really not.
> It's like saying heat isn't real, only energetic particles are real, despite the fact that I just got burned by my hot pan
Which is true, heat isn't real, just like my car isn't real. These are labels we apply to loose macroscopic phenomena. And so it is with consciousness.
At some level of abstraction, we can certainly talk about consciousness as something real since it's clearly a phenomenon requiring explication, but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism.
>but the "real" we're talking about in this sort of debate is some irreducible metaphysical existence, such as that posited by dualism.
But this seems like a mistake. When someone like Dennett says that phenomenal consciousness doesn't exist, it seems like he's denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience. That is, we say that phenomenal experience seems a certain way to us, but Dennett counters that this appearance is false. Denying the reality of the appearances of phenomenal experience is denying the existence of what most people take as the explanandum in this debate.
But there's a difference between denying a theory of the nature of a phenomena and denying the phenomena. We can say that phenomenal experience aren't irreducibly fundamental and not deny the existence of phenomenal experience. But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence.
> But illusion talk denies the phenomena, it's not merely saying it doesn't have a fundamental existence.
I don't see how. An illusion is a perception entailing a false conclusion when taken at face value. The perception clearly exists, but what it entails is the illusion.
Qualia would then fall under the same category as other perceptive illusions, like optical illusions:
Just so we're clear, when you say "appearance of phenomenal experience", I read, "the entailment of a perception". And it seems perfectly sensible to say that the entailments of perceptions can and often are false.
"Entailments of perception" is too broad and so doesn't pick out the right target here. My immediate perception entails that there is a red cup a short distance in front of me. Entailments about the outside world can certainly be false (e.g. that red is a property of the cup that lives in the outside world).
But what does the perception of a red cup entail about my inner state? Nothing that I can tell, except that I am having a perception of a specific kind. What does it mean to say that my perception of a specific kind is an illusion? It's hard to say. The perception gives me certain powers of discrimination that entail the necessary veracity of those aspects of the perception (i.e. I can tell red from blue, red from pain, red from pitch, etc). Are there aspects of perception that don't play a role in any kind of discrimination? Not that I can tell. And so perceptions themselves just don't seem like the kinds of things that can be properly called illusions.
That is an excellent analogy. Perhaps "emergent property" would be a better term for both, but even that phrase doesn't quite capture the true spirit of Dennett's argument. It's not just the consciousness is emergent, it's that its true nature is actually very different from what we think it is.