Where I cannot follow you is your denial that this symbolic domain is experienced by us as " ineffable deeply personal qualit(ies)". They are deeply personal: each of has access to our own symbolic space, and no other. And they are certainly ineffable. Language is just not equipped to transmit them directly, it can only refer to them. Red would be incommunicable to a blind person, and so on. — hypericin

I'm not disagreeing that qualia/experience is not personal, more criticising that by claiming inner experience as "ineffable" people place the domain of experience beyond understanding. Similarly, by calling such experiences deeply personal I think the protagonist for this idea is unjustifiably claiming that, as Dennett puts it, we cannot explain the first person state from the third person view. I tend to disagree. I tend to the view that this domain is accessible to physical explanation and that the qualia-laden character of experience can be described in meaningful physical terms.

y "not really phenomenal qualities", you seem to mean that they are not qualities of the world. I think most here would agree, they are contrivances of our minds. But nonetheless they are phenomenal in the sense of phenomenalism, and in this sense they are real. They are the elementals of our inner lives. — hypericin

Yes, I agree that the objects of experience are phenomenal, if by phenomenalism we mean the idea that the objects of experience are all we can work with. Not though if we extend that to the notion that objects do not exist in themselves (notwithstanding that it is probably the case that we can never really "know" the external objects themselves). Here I was more trying to get at the idea that I believe people mistake the "ineffable quality of blue" for some genuine blueness. The phenomenal character of qualia are, I believe, exhausted by their physical character. Blue is a discrimination, not a "colour".

Just as an aside, I watched the whole Dennett interview and was struck by the somewhat loose nature of his answers. I got the feeling he wasn't even making much sense! When he describes the blue sky thing, he talks about how as we take away various relationships and meanings the subject becomes less conscious. Have I misunderstood him here? That amounts to saying that as we incrementally diminish the extent of conscious experience, the extent of conscious experience diminishes.

I believe that the clearest solution to that is to choose to believe that experience is an operational space - a kind of schematic domain, perhaps even a logical domain. It isn't telling us what the world is like, it's telling us how our operational affordances are organised. — Graeme M

But this "space" and its "telling us what the world is like" is the thing itself to be explained. That is the hard problem- that it has a "telling us what the world is like" aspect at all. This aspect is what is so incorrigibly hard to account for metaphysically. It looks like you are unintentionally participating in the Cartesian Theater fallacy itself by positing this "space" and then referring back to its physical constituents.

It looks like you are unintentionally participating in the Cartesian Theater fallacy itself by positing this "space" and then referring back to its physical constituents. — schopenhauer1

Indeed, but then I did say earlier that there is still no genuine solution to the hard problem, if indeed it even is a problem. The trouble is we seem unable to express a way of looking at the problem without falling into the Cartesian Theatre by default. I do think though that the solution will be more in that kind of idea of a "virtual space", a space enabled by something akin to computationalism. It can't be some kind of representationalism, if by that we mean a genuine "image" of the world.

Indeed, but then I did say earlier that there is still no genuine solution to the hard problem, if indeed it even is a problem. The trouble is we seem unable to express a way of looking at the problem without falling into the Cartesian Theatre by default. I do think though that the solution will be more in that kind of idea of a "virtual space", a space enabled by something akin to computationalism. It can't be some kind of representationalism, if by that we mean a genuine "image" of the world. — Graeme M

Yes this solution too would be falling into the Cartesian Theater. what is "virtual space"? It is yet a hidden mind :D lurking in there. It is sometimes hard to distinguish behavior from mental states. For example, computers are processing information. Processing by itself is not mental states. However, you start to sympathize with the panpsychist view when you ask, "Why can't processing be mental states"? Thus processing itself becomes a sort of indicator of experiential phenomena perhaps. Of course, the kind of experience a simple process has versus brain processing might be completely different. If you start discriminating about which kinds of processing can constitute mental states, then you are simply back to the Cartesian Theater and hidden dualism problem.

This is old but it made me laugh.

No I don't think he or any other person is the so-called philosophical zombie. I personally think he may be playing sort of a devils advocate position. He is understandably concerned about mysticism taking place of critical reasoning regarding consciousness, but at the same time, it does seem like there is something he is just 'not getting' about the contrast between conscious experience and a vast complex network of electric charges.

Dennett is insane. I once heard him say there is no hard problem of consciousness because consciousness doesn't exist lol

I don't understand the difference. — Marchesk

Dennett's representationalism also includes other systems of the body.

These are representations in us that contribute to our cognitive talents without being for us.(In this regard they are no different from the representations of blood sugar level or vitamin deficiency that modulate our digestive systems with-out engaging cerebral cortex at all.) — Dennett 2016:

fwiw, it seems only recent he has started using the word representation at all.