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AlephNeil comments on It's not like anything to be a bat - Less Wrong
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I think you need to be taken outside and shot...
...
...j/k.
It's just that over recent years I've spent quite a long time arguing with people educated principally in philosophy, who hate Dennett and think his version of materialism is absurd (or at least that it's manifestly wrong), and think it's absolutely essential to go around saying things like 'all we know about are correlations between body and mind'.
It's sort-of interesting/refreshing for me to arrive here, with a bunch of people who are (I assume) educated principally in computer science (with perhaps a few mathies and physicists), who are almost unanimously Dennett fans, think that functionalism is just blindingly obvious, that 'zombies' are blindingly obviously impossible, that it's blindingly obvious that the 'Systems Reply' is correct, that anything we build capable of passing the (full) Turing Test would have to be conscious etc.
The ones who don't 'get it' - that at the core of Dennett's view there's the difficult-to-swallow idea that there isn't a 'fact of the matter' as to whether a being is conscious and if so what it's conscious of - can at least fall back on a Greg Egan-style view of consciousness which is identical insofar as it agrees that the issues above are 'blindingly obvious'. (That's the other thing: the people here have actually read Greg Egan - woohoo.)
I can see you have a more in common with the philosopher-types than the locals. And actually, in your interpretation of Dennett I think there's a mistake - one I've seen elsewhere:
You think that in abolishing the 'Cartesian theater' he is ipso facto abolishing phenomenal awareness, but this simply doesn't follow. What he's abolishing is the idea that all of the 'bits' of a person's awareness are present 'together' in a single sharply-defined 'moment', such that there are well-defined answers to questions like "am I seeing a moving dot or a static one?" which would resolve the "Orwellian/Stalinesque" dilemma.
Even after the Cartesian theater is abolished, you can still be a dualist as long as you're prepared to give ground on things like 'the unity of consciousness', and admit that the various parts of the mindscape are slightly removed from each other - not as far removed as the mind of a different person altogether, or even as far as the two hemiminds of a split-brain patient, but certainly not bundled together in a brilliant 'point' of 'inner light'.
I'd just come back as a zombie.
That sums it up well. Next up, let's consider other startling possibilities, such as: there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether you're reading this sentence, there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether this planet exists, there isn't a fact of the matter as to whether there is a fact of the matter as to whether a being is conscious...
Yeah but come on... you always-a-fact-of-the-matter-ists have some startling things to think about too, like The Exact Moment When You First Became Conscious, and the Infinitely Precise Line one can draw across the phylogenetic tree demarcating species whose members are (or may be) conscious and those which never are.
(Afterthought: Or are you some kind of panpsychist? Then your startling possibilities incude the minds of rocks...)
See, it's not so hard! You just have to take the idea seriously, and stick with it. You might even have a talent for this. And here I was thinking that my labor here was in vain.
I believe Eliezer doesn't agree with that last one, and has talked about building an AI who isn't conscious.
Also, consider the following hypothetical: I get really drunk and/or take Ambien and black out at 2 am. I have no conscious experience or memory of the time between 2 am and 3 am, but during that time you have a (loud and drunken) conversation with me. Or maybe in my drunken state I sit at my computer and manage to instant message without being conscious of it, and the person at the other end is convinced I'm human and not a computer program. Counterexample?
Well, I think we can all agree that it's possible for a non-conscious person (or program or whatever) to be mistaken for a conscious being.
However, there are several objections I can make to this scenario being considered a counterexample:
(1) How do you know you're not conscious? Just because you don't remember it the next day doesn't mean you don't have any awareness at the time.
(2) In the Turing test the judge is supposed to be 'on the look-out' for which of its two subjects seems less able to respond adequately to their questions. And one of the subjects is presumed to be a healthy, sober human. So unless you think the judge would be unable to distinguish a drunken, unconscious conversation from a normal, sober one, you would presumably fail the Turing test.