This leads some people to insist that consciousness can never be explained. But why should consciousness be the only thing that can’t be explained? Solids and liquids and gases can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves solids or liquids or gases. Surely life can be explained in terms of things that aren’t themselves alive — and the explanation doesn’t leave living things lifeless. The illusion that consciousness is the exception comes about, I suspect, because of a failure to understand this general feature of successful explanation. Thinking, mistakenly, that the explanation leaves something out, we think to save what otherwise would be lost by putting it back into the observer as a quale — or some other “intrinsically” wonderful property.
I want to propose that Dennett is slightly mistaken; it’s not that people haven’t generalised it to all the relevant cases. Many people have learned that things in their map can be explained in terms of simpler things in their map (e.g. biology, physics, psychology, etc).
However, it can be additionally hard to generalise this to the map itself, - sure, your map of your map should have some reduction (i.e. the brain is made of atoms) but does that really apply to your map, as opposed to your map of your map? People successfully generalise, but they fail to go meta.
From your Dennett-quote at the end:
I want to propose that Dennett is slightly mistaken; it’s not that people haven’t generalised it to all the relevant cases. Many people have learned that things in their map can be explained in terms of simpler things in their map (e.g. biology, physics, psychology, etc).
However, it can be additionally hard to generalise this to the map itself, - sure, your map of your map should have some reduction (i.e. the brain is made of atoms) but does that really apply to your map, as opposed to your map of your map? People successfully generalise, but they fail to go meta.