There’s no question that the Dennett people would love to write me off by means of the homunculus fallacy, or anything else that might deflect my charge that they posit a spooky conception of consciousness. But can they make anything stick? The homunculus charge seems particularly inappropriate given that I directly posit the physics of consciousness in the form of a neurally produced electromagnetic field. Neurons produce the field rather than more basic consciousness fields produce the field. The only legitimate way that I know of to challenge what I propose, would be to actually do the testing that I propose. But this prospect might not go well for them because it should highlight that their “consciousness as the right information processing in itself” proposal, is impossible to disprove and so can’t truly be tested.

While I don’t know how they might effectively argue that my idea is supernatural, I can certainly still argue that their’s is. I consider it unfortunate that John Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment was so complex and depended upon the squishy idea of “understanding Chinese”. Dennett was far too clever and charming to be held accountable that way. But could my simple thought experiment that’s instead based upon the non squishy idea of thumb pain, at least help certain naturalists avoid his path? Maybe.

In the end I’m sure that “consciousness science” will remain quite spooky until after scientists empirically determine various specific things that the brain does to create it. So teasing the Dennett people here is just me having a bit of fun. I’ve found that no true follower of the man can be dissuaded by means of solid arguments alone. But it would also be quite anti-Dennett to reject established science simply to preserve a mere consciousness intuition that he happened to hold. So that’s how I think things will ultimately resolve in this sense. Thus we’d shake hands to finally move the science forward. If you or anyone else find things to say about the comment you linked to (where I discussed a practical means of testing EMF consciousness), then I’ll of course be interested!