How come ''consciousness doesn't exist'' is so popular among philosophers and scientists today? Some of you argued about Dennett's view. Let me explain:
1. Dennet doesn't give a damn about the consciousness, his point was to make us believe that it isn't ''extraordinary'', because anything that is out of the ordinary scares the atheist inside him.
2. Therefore, Dennett refutes the panpsychist view by saying everything that consciousness is made of is just dead matter, so it is just an emergent property of dead unconsciouss matter. Panpsychism is far from being a theistic view, but it does imply something extraordinary about reality, and again, everything extraordinary, even if does not directly imply God, simply scares Dennett.
3. The problem with that is that if this were the case, than it would be even more than extraordinary, I would say magic: to add things with 0 value of something and to get something with a value greater than 0. That's not extraordinary, it's magic.
4. So Dennett doesn't say consciousness doesn't exist, because he knows he'd be ridiculous. Dennet, on one hand, denies the ''extraordinary'' and translates the ''magic'' of the emergence into ''tricks'' in order to look banal. As long as everything remains banal, there is simply no room for God.
This is why Dennet is so ambiguous. His purpose wasn't consciousness but that of denying everything that might imply a God, even if very indirectly.
So yes, this guy is truly is a ''bag of tricks''!