As we will see next time it is not just any old information that can do the trick. And in the end it doesn't imply computational functionalism, which is what Searle and others have been targeting. Dennett is a pessimist par excellence, trying to disenchant the world maximally - to me it seems he is getting old and weary and is bitter that he never found a solution to all the paradoxical questions he posed with Hofstadter when he was younger. Churchland is another beast altogether, and I think he misunderstands his own position as an eliminativist. As we will see I have a lot of common ground with him. Unfortunately, Churchland is enveloped by the same pessimism that Dennett and his wife Patricia are particularly aggressive in advocating, which leads him astray on certain crucial issues. Ultimately I think there is a neat solution around all these spiritual quagmires.
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Okay, well I'm curious - especially to see what kind of information-processing does not count as what Dennett called "maximally bland computationalism" - which includes e.g. quantum computing.
And I don't think Dennett is a pessimist - he still clearly thinks the world is a wonderful place. You might think the world is wonderful even if it doesn't have unicorns in it without thereby being a "pessimist" for saying there are no unicorns, and Dennett similarly thinks it's wonderful even without qualia in it.
But I will await your neat solution!