There's something else I want to say here because I worry that I send the impression that I've tried to refute Dennett, or functionalism. I've not really. There's a way in which I agree with it, and I think this is important. There was a famous counterargument put forward against functionalism by Ned Block called the China Brain Problem. It was basically meant to show how the functionalist paradigm could be applied to people themselves, and by organizing so many people together in a chain of information flow that resulted in some functional outcome, that you'd be forced to say that a billion Chinese people all working in a coordinated pattern must represent a mind.

Although it was meant as a rebuttal, I personally think that it reinforces an important truth about mind, at least the important aspect that we're interested in (which is that egoic sort of focal point of subjective experience). It isn't in the diagram. It transcends the diagram, and it must. Kant so famously argued that fact in the greatest bit of Western philosophy that's ever been written - at least since the middle ages. There can be no doubt that the mental supervenes on the physical. This is obvious. If you rearrange the parts, you fundamentally alter the mind. Block's China Brain would, in my opinion, constitute a mind - although, whether it would be a conscious one is a problem I want to address below.

If the physical properties G are rearranged, the mental properties M are changed. If I fire a bullet into your brain, we'll realize this is true rather quickly. But I also think it is possible (logically) that an atomically identical brain in a possible world could exist which did not have an experience. That's not to say that it is metaphysically possible, just logically possible. So a brain is necessary, but not sufficient to explain the interesting part about the mind.

This is where continental philosophers have recognized something important that was lost on the analytic guys (perhaps until Andy Clark began to talk about extended mind relatively recently), which is that the so-called function is not isolated to what we think of as the internal environment of the thinking system. It includes the environment as well. That is, in the case of pain for example, the pain is not merely a reaction to a stimulus outside of the organism experiencing pain. Rather, the thing which is thought to cause the pain is also part of the pain - and the experiencer of the pain knows that it is pain, in part, because of what it is that's causing it.

If we think that the kinds of judgments involved in the direct experience of pain are transcendental, then the Christian will say that we can explain this extended functionalism (which incorporates everything in the state of affairs, including the environment) because what underlies the essence of everything in the function is God. Put one way, it's all God, you're just a localized point of experience and judgment that can freely choose to structure states of affairs according to your will.

This is why, in the past, I've been interested in the idea of mental properties. We can look at the function described by Dennett and see that every component in this diagram is comprised of not just the physical properties (say, of the C-fibers), but of mental properties. What the C-fibers encounter as they feed causally into the brain is a more complex functional arrangement of the mental properties, because their corresponding physical properties are more complexly arranged. Ultimately, this would represent my metaphysical argument against the possibility of zombies, because in actuality there are no physical properties without the corresponding mental properties. If this isn't the case, then a zombie is perfectly logically feasible.

The China Brain thought experiment highlights this very conveniently. We have no problem seeing that each Chinese person in the billion-person chain instantiates a mind, and so taken together their coordinated physical arrangement results in a unique collective kind of mind. We have only to see that the neurons are analogous to individual persons, which physically situated in the right manner of interdependence to form a brain, come to constitute the collective mind which supervenes on the physical properties of that brain.

Metaphysically, I take the universe to be constituted by mental properties which have the essential end to converge. The physical properties are precisely what represent the 'external' language of the mental properties and which, in limited ways, permit those mental properties to interact with one another. The mental remains fundamentally concealed, but in cases such as brains, there has evolved a unique confluence of physical matter that allows the mental properties to (in effect) transcend the physical language. This happens because a supra-physical means of language obtains: an energetic one. The neurons in the brain are able to communicate via voltage waves, not simply direct synapse-to-synapse digital connections, but through actual waves that propagate across the entire brain.

So, I take an ecological view of mind, and I find that our brain (again, in terms of the interesting part about mind) has actually come with a great redundancy. From the many neurons, we get what amounts to TWO minds - left and right hemispheres. It has been shown that a person can lose an entire hemisphere and not only survive, but live mostly normally, save for perhaps an inability to express themselves in certain left-or-right associated ways. From the many we converge into two, and by way of the interaction of the two across the corpus callosum, we converge into one - the mental properties transcending the physical language contained in their physical orientation to one another, interacting in supra-physical ways that only supervene on the physical, but which transcend them.

Of course, this all depends upon something God-like in the universe. And also par for the course, Dennett would accuse this of being vitalism, which for my part doesn't seem to be as obviously false as he likes to suggest it is. The Christian would say, "Of course vitalism is true." Rather, I think consciousness is multiply realizable, and that follows from what I've said above. This does also mean that consciousness would be possibly realized in machine, although I've argued in another post that I don't think it will occur quite the way science fiction imagines it. The final point I'd like to make is that the picture I've painted here says that consciousness is something which occurs when the mental properties transcend the limitations of the physical language, indicating that for any observer, the possibility of consciousness in some system can only be determined where that system can communicate with us in ways which we accept as signs of consciousness. It is no surprise, therefore, that we accept human consciousness unquestioningly, because of our shared language.

This is ultimately why consciousness must be regarded practically as the ability to report that one is conscious. If we artificially limit the ways that we define consciousness to report itself, then it is possible that we could miss vital parts of mind in larger universal systems. Recall here that the ancients regarded many things in their world as expressions of an animating principle or deity. It strikes us as peculiar today that a Native American may have looked at an incoming storm and said of it: "The sky is angry today." I'd rather not take this as a literal indication that the planet is conscious in the human sense, but instead that humans once intuitively tried to understand the physical language of the universe in the same terms as they understood their own consciousness. When our paradigm shifted toward only recognizing the material properties of the world, and not as a language, we instead allowed the physical to feedback onto us and dilute our own views of what is vital in us, seeing everything as thoughtless mechanism.

Dennett is smarter than us...

As to that point, I have zero doubt he is (at least in my case). Dennett is super smart. That said, I know that your point wasn't to say that he isn't, but to point out that there's no requirement to be as smart as he is to engage in basic reasoning, and there's nothing that prevents a reasonable assent to a smarter person's position, if what you're utilizing to get there is good reasoning.

That's why I like to drill down, if I'm able, to see certain things in common sensical terms. I read a 50-pg academic paper by Dennett, and despite that he understands his thought better than I am able to, I can still shine light on the most conspicuous outcroppings of error: contradictions, or category errors, or straw men, or what have you.

In that last comment, I just pointed out what I thought Chalmers might as well, which is that Dennett is (to a degree) defeating a straw man and failing to answer what is the really troublesome question.

Even if a philosopher of mind wants to argue for functionalism, and further, to say that pain just is the function (which Dennett laid out provisionally in his diagram), you aren't answering why there is something it is like to be a function. You've just moved the goalposts forward by the space of the definition of the word function. Okay, I'm a function. Why am I a function having an experience of a world?

To which Dennett replies: parallel non-linear processes of perceptual organization just result in it, more or less accidentally. PIXIE DUST!

ST I-II Q35 A1 RO1

That's a super interesting quote from Aquinas. And we think we're so futuristic with our phrases like 'quale'.