[throwaway37585]

> When people imagine their consciousness/free will faculty as its own object, they sometimes see a theatre/stage, where they are in the audience and can observe the central point where consciousness ends up forming, or a deamon sitting in front of a bunch of levers and pulling one to make a conscious free will decision.

I don't know anyone who sees consciousness this way, but perhaps we've met different sorts of people.

Your second paragraph seems like a red herring. I don't see how any of this addresses the issue of conscious experience in the first place.

[taurine]

It addresses the issue by telling you: Don't worry about consciousness in the first place. How your higher-level cognitive faculties see and categorize consciousness is proven to be an illusion. Eliminate this singular consciousness, this artificial construct, and any hard or soft problem disappears with it, and we can start defining conscious experience proper, instead of trying the impossible and give a solution to everyone's subjective (and possibly eternally conflicting) theatric view of consciousness.

It is not always the goal (or possible) to create a complete model of conscious experience that is indistinguishable from reality, yet one may model the path of a hurricane without getting blown away by the wind.

[rosser]

And this is why, no matter how many downvotes it gets (and believe me, I get them for it), I will continue to say Dennett's book should have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away."

He dances around the thing pretty much everyone else means when they say "consciousness" or "the Hard Problem" and says of everything he can, "Welp, that's not the thing they're talking about!", except the thing we're talking about, which he more or less doesn't even acknowledge.

"'Blue' means only Pantone-292. The sky isn't Pantone-292. Therefore, the sky isn't blue."

Specious, isn't it?

[taurine]

I think it was because in a time where objectivism ruled, consciousness was still a highly subjective subject. "Consciousness Explained" was an effort to discover the other side of the coin.

A subjectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is fully formed inside his/her mind. An objectivist sees art, and reasons that the art object is entirely contained in the physical manifestation of it. Consciousness Explained was an attempt to show this objectivist view of consciousness.

Later on he tried to marry both in heterophenomonology: "The sky seems blue to non-colorblind subjects, but objectively, in reality, it part of the human-visible spectrum of wave-length n.". This framework still gives legitimacy to the subjective experience of a colorblind person, without allowing this to change physical reality (for consciousness: allowing for personal experience and realization of it, without allowing this to change the neuroscience/ontology "i experience sequential thought, therefor thoughts must be sequential, not parallel.").