Descartes, Dennet, and Dedication

Descartes' conclusion that humans are devoid of conscious experience runs counter to the deeply rooted sense in all of us that we all have conscious experience—quallia, sentience, sapience—and that such experience is the essence of any meaningful life. John Searle says it well when he writes, “ . . . if your theory results in the view that consciousness does not exist, you have simply produced a reductio ad absurdum of your theory.”