>The 'hard problem' here is to explain how a set of physical processes give rise to consciousness or sensory experience at all. In other words, why the lights are on.
Dennett would reply: once I've explained every detail of the physiological system, and in so doing perfectly mapped inputs to outputs, what is there left to explain?
I think it's more like, "there is no reason to suppose there is anything beyond this line because everything can be explained without crossing it", which is logically valid.
It's about honesty - intellectual honesty. You / I can be mistaken, if it's an honest mistake then you/I will never know. Erroneously or not - the basic is that this is what you believe.
That is not what DD is claiming though. It is more along the lines of: "If X exists it is beyond this line. I can't explain anything beyond the line, so X is an illusion." That is what DD claims.
In another well-known article, “Quining Qualia” (1988), Dennett challenges not just our conception of pain, but all of our different notions of qualitative states. His argument focuses on the apparently essential features of qualia, including their inherent subjectivity and their private nature. Dennett discusses several cases—both actual and imaginary—to expose ways in which these ordinary intuitions about qualia pull apart. In so doing, Dennett suggests our qualia concepts are fundamentally confused and fail to correspond with the actual inner workings of our cognitive system.
X (qualia, what we don't know) does not correspond to Y (cognition, what we understand), so X does not exist.
> We have no reason to suppose X because Y can explain X as an illusion.
But Y does not really explain X. That is core point. Saying Y explains X is just igoring the question. It is just Dennett claiming "Y explains X" with a flawed argument.
> It's the exact same process that happens in every other science: you don't expand your axiomatic basis unless you have to.
Btw, when talking about axioms, there are rigid formalized versions of physics and math (look up Mizar). Unless Dennet proves his claims with a formal theorem with rigidly defined axioms, I am not buying his arguments. Too much fluff in philosophy when dealing with important problems.
Just the word "illusion" can have n different definitions and maybe the illusion itself is an illusion :D
> But Y does not really explain X. That is core point. Saying Y explains X is just igoring the question. It is just Dennett claiming "Y explains X" with a flawed argument.
We have no reason to believe that Y cannot explain X, and ample reason to believe it can. Every previous circumstance of special pleading of this sort has eventually fallen to scientific inquiry.
Furthermore, various observations and theorems in physics, like the conservation of energy and the Bekenstein Bound, suggest strongly that the mind is a fully encapsulated, bounded physical system.
The only way to escape this inevitability is to posit that consciousness is some extra-physical quantity that has no impact on physical matter whatsoever. And what problem does adding this to our axiomatic basis solve exactly? None that I can see except yet another instance of special pleading.
If anything, such a step actually introduces more problems, because how would you explain the fact that we, beings of physical matter, are talking about consciousness if consciousness cannot influence matter?
"The line we placed there was arbitrary. The division it creates is the very cause of the problems of consciousness. Science experiments show that it is likely at the wrong location, no matter how confident we were when we drew it. I will attempt to solve these artificial problems of consciousness by showing that it is a miscategorization and not-well-justified to draw the line in the first place."
I'd argue that any such mapping of inputs and outputs, (fully mapping our mind) would equally describe to a system that is not conscious. In other words, the whole analysis could as well be describing a zombie that behaves like us but does not have experiences.
Put another way, it would fail to capture why that system (our brains) produce any experiences at all. I know this is disputed, of course. But I basically think the hard problem is a real thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
A memoryless and stateful system may produce similar or even same output given identical input. Since you cannot quantity infinite span of inputs, you cannot quite be sure which one you're dealing with.
This is even harder if both systems are noisy.
The mechanistic corollary is that you have to mess with whatever causes consciousness to actually understand it. Inject states, damage components and more. Even then you might make a mistake.
Dennett would reply: once I've explained every detail of the physiological system, and in so doing perfectly mapped inputs to outputs, what is there left to explain?