[wildmusings]

>I'm not familiar with either author, but this sounds so wrong that I wonder if you misrepresented it

No that’s exactly what Dennett argues, and that’s why his position is so maddening and infuriating to people who do think there’s a hard problem.

It is like asking about the nature of an apple and being told that there is no apple. Then throwing the apple at their head, only to have the person continue insisting that the apple is a figment of your imagination.

[stcredzero]

Then throwing the apple at their head, only to have the person continue insisting that the apple is a figment of your imagination.

Now you're getting to the realm of torture, pain, and horror. I think that most people can be quickly driven to the point of admitting the reality of the consciousness of pain and horror. This isn't an experiment that would easily get past the ethics board, however.

[posterboy]

It's also like eating the apple in response and asking "which apple?". Eating is an existential problem, but not a hard one, at least not as hard as procuring the food, which in turn even lower animals may accomplish.