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AndyWood comments on Dennett's "Consciousness Explained": Prelude - Less Wrong
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Heterophenomenology is neat, tidy, and and wonderful for doing science about a whole bunch of questions about inner sensation. It's great as far as it goes. Some of us just don't think it goes to the finish line, and are deeply dissatisfied with the attitude that seems to suggest that it is our "scientific duty" to abandon the question of how the brain generates characteristic inner sensations, on the grounds that we can't directly access such things from the outside. I believe that future discovery and insight will show that view (assuming I am even ascribing it correctly in the first place) to be short-sighted.
Heterophenomenology does tackle that question, just at one remove - it attempts to account for your reports of those inner sensations.
Again, that is useful in its own right, but the indirection changes the question, and so it is not an answer. Accounting for reports of sensations is not conceptually problematic. It's easy to imagine making the same kinds of explanations for the utterances of a simpler, unconscious machine.
Except that there are certain utterances I would not expect the machine to make. E.g., assuming it was not designed with trickery in mind, I would not expect the machine to insist that it had a tangible, first-person, inner experience. Explaining the utterances does not explain the actual mechanism that I'm talking about when I insist that I have that experience.
I'm not interested in why I say it, I'm interested in what it is that the brain is doing to produce that experience. If it's a bidirectional feedback loop involving my body, itself, and its environment (or whatever), then I want to know that. And I want to know whether one can construct such a feedback loop and have it experience the same effect.
Please note that I am not making the standard zombie argument. I'm suggesting that humans and animals must have an extra physical - not metaphysical, not extra-physical - component that produces our first-person experience. I want to know how that works, and I currently do not accept that that question is either meaningless, or unanswerable in principle.
This is precisely the point!
Why not? Why, once we've explained why you sincerely insist you have that experience, do you assume there's more to explain?
For certain senses of the word "why" in that sentence, which do not "explain away" the experience, there might not be more to explain.
From reading Dennett, I have not yet got the sense that he, at least, ever means to answer "why" non-trivially. Trivially, I already know why I insist - it's because I have subjective experience. I can sit here in silence all day and experience all kinds of non-verbal assurances that this is so - textures, tastes, colors, shapes, spacial relationships, sounds, etc.
Whatever systems in my brain register these, and register the registering, interact with the systems that produce beliefs, speech, and so forth. What I'm looking for, and what I suspect a lot of people who posit a "hard problem" are really looking for, is more detail on how the registration works.
Dennett's "multiple drafts" model might be a good start, for all I know, but it leaves me wanting more. Not wanting a so-called Cartesian Theater - just wanting more explanation of the sort that might be very vaguely analogous to how an electromagnetic speaker produces sound waves. Frankly, I find it very difficult even to think of a proper analogy. At any rate, I'm happy to wait until someone figures it out, but in the meantime I object to philosophies that imply there is nothing left to figure out.
Which, to his credit, Dennett does not imply (at least, not in Consciousness Explained).