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'.
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.
Yes, this was my point. I'm pretty sure I acknowledged the intelligence of men like Dennett months ago when making pretty much the same point as I am now - that reasoning is reasoning regardless of such disparities.
That isn't to say Dennett isn't guilty of major blunders in terms of his failure to understand the basic truths of first principles. I was reminded of EMJ's writings against Dennett et al in Logos Rising just yesterday, when watching an interview with him and an old guest of Taylor Marshall's show, (I was very excited when I saw the title, thinking perhaps EMJ had finally discovered Smith), in which he relates .
Oh, nice! I am going to be catching this interview today for sure.
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