My understanding of Dennett's argument is that it is partially an argument against those philosophers and cognitive scientists that, protests aside, essentially believe in an "essence" of consciousness that is more than just the processes of the brain, whether it be a soul or they call it something else. The idea that there is an essential "I" or self "inside" the mind rather than a variety of processes that give us the illusion, subjectively, that we are conscious (and I know "subjectively" as a word becomes problematic but...language is hard here).
When I read all of this a few years ago, the implication seemed pretty clear that Dennett was arguing, in this context, that we are ALL zimboes. We think we have a consciousness, unitary or otherwise, and will express ourselves as having one to others, but that it is an illusion of self papering over a variety of mental processes, which act independently, like the ones of vision and its interpretation.
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