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When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.

Addendum to the question:

Here is the link for the book online: https://scilib-biology.narod.ru/Dennett/CE/index.html

See chapter 12, section 4, page 389

Here is the claim Dennett makes:

When you say “This is my quale,” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions. This does provide support, however, for the shockingly “verificationist” or “positivistic” view that the very idea of inverted qualia is nonsense — and hence that the very idea of qualia is nonsense.

Dennett's text engages in narratives, rather than clear or explicit arguments. This is a common critique of the book, that it is more of a set of intuition pumps than it is a reasoned argument for his Delusionism view of consciousness.

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.

Addendum to the question, addded by dcleve:

Here is the link for the book online: https://scilib-biology.narod.ru/Dennett/CE/index.html

See chapter 12, section 4, page 389

Here is the claim Dennett makes:

When you say “This is my quale,” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions. This does provide support, however, for the shockingly “verificationist” or “positivistic” view that the very idea of inverted qualia is nonsense — and hence that the very idea of qualia is nonsense.

This is a very similar argument to that he made in Quining Qualia -- which is that it is just the behaviorist functions and dispositions we care about, and if we try to characterize a "something more" happening solely inside our heads, we end up thoroughly confused and unclear. So one can reasonably treat "something more" as irrelevant, and effectively non-existent.

Note I had to spell this argument out myself. This is because Dennett's text engages in narratives, rather than clear or explicit arguments. This is a common critique of the book, that it is more of a set of intuition pumps than it is a reasoned argument for his Delusionism view of consciousness.

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.

Addendum to the question:

Here is the link for the book online: https://scilib-biology.narod.ru/Dennett/CE/index.html

See chapter 12, section 4, page 389

Here is the claim Dennett makes:

When you say “This is my quale,” what you are singling out, or referring to, whether you realize it or not, is your idiosyncratic complex of dispositions. You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology, but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions. This does provide support, however, for the shockingly “verificationist” or “positivistic” view that the very idea of inverted qualia is nonsense — and hence that the very idea of qualia is nonsense.

Dennett's text engages in narratives, rather than clear or explicit arguments. This is a common critique of the book, that it is more of a set of intuition pumps than it is a reasoned argument for his Delusionism view of consciousness.

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

When Daniel Dennett denies qualia in his book Consciousness Explained, after the thought experiment of "feeding your visual experience into my brain via a cable," he reasons as follows:

"Suppose the technician pulls the plug on the connecting cable, inverts it 180 degrees, reinserts it in the socket, and I now report the sky is blue, the grass green, and so forth."

Then again, a similar reasoning is repeated (with illustration!) involving a person's eye connected through neurosurgery with "crossed-over RGB cabling."

I think it's a flawed presupposition to argue against the qualia hypothesis.
It's clear we can't just "cross over cables," just as we can't arbitrarily cross over electric cables like "+" and "-". In attributing this type of argument to qualia supporters, Dennett assigns them a weak position that's easy to refute.

Is Dennett's argument a decisive and valid argument? -- Opinions on this may vary. But if so, what would be the main counter argument(s) against my supposition that the argument is flawed?

Without taking a stand in the question "whether qualia exist or not", it should still be possible to point out what according to Dennett (or to a point of view compatible with Dennett's) the main counter arguments would be.