So I'm through chapter 5 on Dennett's book. My main analysis of his writing is that he's mostly doing two things
1. Arguing by Proxy (related to strawmanning/weakmanning/motte-and-bailey). He'll pick something, like the idea that we have an immaterial self that has free will, and argue against it. But he doesn't make it clear that he's strictly arguing against this one thing; it feels like he's attacking consciousness realism more broadly. This isn't an isolated thing, he does over and over again. The ability to be fooled about things in general as a proxy for the ability to be fooled about having experience. Our overestimating the fidelity of the visual field as a proxy for the idea that we see images at all. Our not being able to tell what weird phenomenological effects exist as a proxy for ignorance about phenomenology broadly. ...[^1]
2. Distracting you from the lack of substance by talking a lot and using analogies. Man, so much of this book is filler. He just keeps going on these elaborate metaphors to make a point that, at least as far I'm concerned, you could have just been stated plainly and I'd have gotten it immediately.
What's frustrating about this is that this is so clear to me, like it feels like I'm seeing through his tricks so easily. And I want to just beam that understanding into other people's heads but I can't.