Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the nature of language perception. You don't ne

Dennett is making a (naive) philosophical point about the nature of consciousness, not a linquistic point about the nature of language perception. You don't need a Cartesian Theatre, or even strict reassembly. I'd expect something more like a hierarchical/nested structure of template recognition for common word sequences and sentence structures. Brains notice certainly when out of order are words. But brains can still make sense of them - with some extra effort - as long as there's still some templated structure left to work with. You need to randomise much longer sequences before the templating breaks down. None of this says anything relevant about what consciousness may or may not be. It's still the same old problem of qualia, only now it's about qualia that are perceived as linguistic and conceptual relationships, not trivial perceptual identifications. ("Dog", "orange", "philosopher", etc.)