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His thought problems with evil surgeons and logic paths from photo-receptor to color qualia are not actually arguments, they are efforts to guide his reader's intuition to make his particular worldview more intellectually satisfying to them. They are perfectly acceptable persuasive tools, which is as clos as it comes to saying "yes, they are as valid as any other persuasion is."

Dennett himself, in one section of Consciousness Explained, also had to address the way our minds act as von-Neuman/Turing machines, despite being wired completely differently. Our brains are wired a massively parallel neural nets, with no central processor unit, no linear processing etc. Our computers are designed like we reason, as linear von Neuman machines. Our brains are instead wired in a parallel analog fashion. To address this tremendous disconnect between wring and brain function, Dennett postulates that we "run a virtual Von-Neumann machine on our analog hardware". But running programs and having virtual machines in our heads -- is not DISPOSITONS (analog neural nets DO develop dispositions), and is instead pretty explicitly "theory of mind" "in our heads" being "causal".

So, between his peers being convinced by the experience of experience, the utility of theory of mind, the advances in science demonstrating the reality and causal nature of both qualia and consciousness, and Dennett himself not even being able to build a behaviorist model -- Dennett's persuasive advocacy -- has run into a suite of falsifying test cases.

His thought problems with evil surgeons and logic paths from photo-receptor to color qualia are not actually arguments, they are efforts to guide his reader's intuition to make his particular worldview more intellectually satisfying to them. They are perfectly acceptable persuasive tools, which is as close as it comes to saying "yes, they are as valid as any other persuasion is."

Dennett himself, in one section of Consciousness Explained, also had to address the way our minds act as von-Neuman/Turing machines, despite being wired completely differently. Our brains are wired a massively parallel neural nets, with no central processor unit, no linear processing etc. Our computers are designed like we reason, as linear von Neuman machines. To address this tremendous disconnect between wiring and brain function, Dennett postulates that we "run a virtual Von-Neumann machine on our analog hardware". But running programs and having virtual machines in our heads -- is not DISPOSITONS (analog neural nets DO develop dispositions). It is instead pretty explicitly "theory of mind" "in our heads" being "causal", and Dennett admitting all of this to be “virtual” is Dennett himself adopting a causal dualism that he repeatedly savages among his peers.

So, between his peers being convinced by the experience of experience, the utility of theory of mind, the advances in science demonstrating the reality and causal nature of both qualia and consciousness, and Dennett himself not even being able to build a behaviorist model and having to resort to an emergent causal dualism -- Dennett's persuasive advocacy -- has run into a multitude of falsifying test cases.

One of the peculiar features of Consciousness Explained is that in it, Dennett has almost no arguments. Instead, he is using intuition pumps to try to induce his readers to adopt his assumption set. Near the end of the book, he admits that he wrote it based on the core assumption set of Julian Jaynes, whose "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" assumes that human brains can "run" different operating systems, and that about 5000 years ago, the "bicameral mind" operating system was spontaneously replaced by our "conscious mind" operating system, in a runaway memetic infection event. Through intuition pumps, he attempted to reboot his reader's minds, such that they would no longer have the delusion of being conscious.

One of the peculiar features of Consciousness Explained is that in it, Dennett has almost no arguments. Instead, he is using intuition pumps to try to induce his readers to adopt his assumption set. Near the end of the book, he admits that he wrote it based on the core assumption set of Julian Jaynes, whose "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" assumes that human brains can "run" different operating systems, and that about 5000 years ago, the "bicameral mind" operating system was spontaneously replaced by our "conscious mind" operating system, in a runaway memetic infection event. Through intuition pumps, Dennett he attempted to create a similar runaway memetic infection event that would reboot his reader's minds, such that they would no longer have the delusion of being conscious.

Dennett himself, in one section of Consciousness Explained, also had to address the way our minds act as von-Neuman/Turing machines, despite being wired completely differently. Our brains are wired a massively parallel neural nets, with no central processor unit, no linear processing etc. Our computers are designed like we reason, as linear von Neuman machines. Our brains are instead wired in a parallel analog fashion. To address this tremendous disconnect between wring and brain function, Dennett postulates that we "run a virtual Von-Neumann machine on our analog hardware". But running programs and having virtual machines in our heads -- is not DISPOSITONS (analog neural nets DO develop dispositions), and is instead pretty explicitly "theory of mind" "in our heads" being "causal".

So, between his peers being convinced by the experience of experience, the utility of theory of mind, and Dennett himself not even being able to build a behaviorist model -- Dennett's persuasive advocacy -- has run into a suite of falsifying test cases.

Of particular note is that some of our best recent science refutes behaviorism. Examples:

• The psychology that replaced behaviorism was cognitive psychology, whose core premise is that the mind is causal. The fruitfulness of this method has spawned another science, Cognitive Science, whose focus is on how we do this causal mental processing.
• one of our best recent set of psych experiments on decision making -- those detailed by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking Fast and Slow, has our consciousness, system 2, acting as a 2nd guess checker on our unconscious decision making done by system 1.
• Neuroscience has characterized the role of consciousness, vs. system 1 unconscious processing, as that of a CEO, monitoring the unconscious processes. And Qualia are the way the unconscious processes communicate with the conscious CEO. This model is detailed by David Eagleman in Incognito.

Dennett himself, in one section of Consciousness Explained, also had to address the way our minds act as von-Neuman/Turing machines, despite being wired completely differently. Our brains are wired a massively parallel neural nets, with no central processor unit, no linear processing etc. Our computers are designed like we reason, as linear von Neuman machines. Our brains are instead wired in a parallel analog fashion. To address this tremendous disconnect between wring and brain function, Dennett postulates that we "run a virtual Von-Neumann machine on our analog hardware". But running programs and having virtual machines in our heads -- is not DISPOSITONS (analog neural nets DO develop dispositions), and is instead pretty explicitly "theory of mind" "in our heads" being "causal".

So, between his peers being convinced by the experience of experience, the utility of theory of mind, the advances in science demonstrating the reality and causal nature of both qualia and consciousness, and Dennett himself not even being able to build a behaviorist model -- Dennett's persuasive advocacy -- has run into a suite of falsifying test cases.