> The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. That's kind of a straw man of what Dennett's

> The consciousness is not some magical force that enters us but just a giant bag of tricks that our brain plays. That's kind of a straw man of what Dennett's opponents argue. No philosopher seriously says that consciousness is a magical force entering the brain. Rather, they make arguments that materialism (physicalism) fails to account for consciousness, whatever that entails for metaphysics or epistemology. Some are naturalists, but not physicalists. Some are idealists. Some like David Chalmers propose a kind of property dualism. Others might be neutral monists or think we're cognitively closed to the solution. Or panpsychists were everything has a bit of consciousness. Materialism is a metaphysical assumption. We don't know the truth of what reality fundamentally is (it could be a simulation for all we know). We also don't know how to bridge the subjective/objective divide, as Thomas Nagel has argued. Another way of framing the argument is that the objective world is an abstraction across many subjective experiences, where consciousness is abstracted in favor of mathematical forms. That works well for describing/predicting patterns in nature we observe, including the brain, but then when you turn it around to explain the mind, it runs into difficulties, since the abstracted-away subjectivity has been left out. There's no need to muddy the waters with the word "magic". We don't know everything, and some things we might never know. We do know that we have experiences of color, sound, taste, smells, feels, dreams, inner dialog and what not. That's not magic, it's just how we experience being in the world, whatever the world and our experiences are. Here's a view opposing Dennett's from Jaron Lanier: http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html http://www.jaronlanier.com/zombie.html