Being wrong about what one feels
On the axis: The enigma of consciousness · one's own experience
I can be wrong about the world, and even about my own motives, but about my very pain? It seems the one point where seeming and being coincide. What if that very obviousness were the best-installed illusion of all, a brain representing to itself an inner life as it believes it to be?
Justification
Dennett rejects as the tradition conceives them: intrinsic, ineffable, private and infallible properties, given to introspection. What exists are brain states and the real patterns to which our reports attach; introspection is not a gaze upon an inner stage but a source of reports, often confabulated, which his method, heterophenomenology, treats as data to be explained rather than as established facts. Consciousness is therefore not denied: it is the appearance of an inner glow that itself becomes the effect to be explained.
Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery.Consciousness Explained (1991), ch. 1, opening sentence
"Quining Qualia" (1988) · Consciousness Explained (1991)
Anchors: Frankish · Dennett