> We had a debate at office about this. We had a lot of trouble untangling perception (or awareness) from qualia (which is basically a thing as experienced by a person).
This is the essence of the hard problem of consciousness: do qualia actually exist such that they are different than the perceptions that lead to them? Dennett thinks not, and that like all of our mental faculties, "qualia" are simply another cognitive trick to help us shift or maintain focus on important stimuli (or serve some other functional purpose).
An analogy I like to use is that qualia would be similar to how single-CPU computers can give the illusion of parallelism by rapid context switching.
This is the essence of the hard problem of consciousness: do qualia actually exist such that they are different than the perceptions that lead to them? Dennett thinks not, and that like all of our mental faculties, "qualia" are simply another cognitive trick to help us shift or maintain focus on important stimuli (or serve some other functional purpose).
An analogy I like to use is that qualia would be similar to how single-CPU computers can give the illusion of parallelism by rapid context switching.