[naasking]

> What is notable about qualia is that it is possible to have them at all. An illusion is definitionally a qualia. You cannot have an illusion without qualia existing.

I think that's incorrect, as it relies on a definition of "illusion" that begs the question on the existence of a subject, just like Descartes. Define illusion as "a perception that directly entails a false conclusion", and there is no subject needed.

> I think he wants it to be possible that you can somehow experience things in a non-mysterious way, and this this non-mysterious experience explains the mysterious experience stuff. I think he's wrong.

No, what he's saying is that there is no "you" to experience anything, there are only scattered but correlated thoughts that are stitched together in a way that produces a false conclusion that there is a "you".

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Where does that false conclusion occur? What is the entity in which it occurs?

There is no "conclusion" here in the sense of "2+2=4". What is at stake is not a reasoned, or evidential analysis of how the world is. It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).

Regardless of whether there is a singular "you" or, in Minsky's term, a "society of mind" (or self, to line up with Dennett a little more), something enjoys subjective experience, and you call that that "you". It doesn't really matter how it arises, whether it accurately reflects the operations of the brain/body: the existence of subjective experience creates a self.

[naasking]

> It is, rather, that subjective experience exists (we know it exists because we have subjective experience, and whether the experience is of something invented and false does not change the fact that the experience exists).

What is in dispute here is what "subjective experience" means. If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description, then we can agree that it exists and that our observations are actually evidence of its existence.

But this is not what most people mean by this term, and it is that term that is a fiction on the eliminativist view.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> If we both agree that "subjective experience" is a phenomenon that can in principle be captured by a third person objective description,

Now we get to the heart of it (and the reason why consciousness is and has been such a difficult problem): I do not agree that this is true.