To my read and mind, there was no denial of that subjective experience, merely an attempt to frame a useful question around it.
All of science is based upon shareable ideas, many testable. They may have begun as vague notions bouncing inchoate through our consciousness (or subconsciousness, etc., yada, so forth) but at some point they became expressible, then, eventually, measurable.
If we want to study consciousness, whatever it/they is/are, then first we need to agree to useful operational definitions, things we can tease apart observationally, reason about, form hypotheses, then eventually theories.
If one accepts that all human experience are fundamentally based on biology (since our meat seems to be all we have, at least until some extra-corporeal notion such as the soul is itself capable of being measured, analyzed, and reasoned about), then, fundamentally, our individual subjective experiences are based on what would likely be common chemistry and biology.
So back to the original comment: Is consciousness a real state? We identify it as such, but perhaps it is several, perhaps many, cooperative or even competitive microstates, if you will, all of which together give us the experience of consciousness, but which are inaccessible to us...
...just as the perception of individual hues and saturations within our eyes are inaccessible, since they reach "us" after considerable backend processing (literally, since visual processing is largely occipital).
If we are going to make progress on understanding consciousness, we first need to set it aside and ask "what is going on?" at various levels, then, eventually, draw a complete picture from those dots....
All of science is based upon shareable ideas, many testable. They may have begun as vague notions bouncing inchoate through our consciousness (or subconsciousness, etc., yada, so forth) but at some point they became expressible, then, eventually, measurable.
If we want to study consciousness, whatever it/they is/are, then first we need to agree to useful operational definitions, things we can tease apart observationally, reason about, form hypotheses, then eventually theories.
If one accepts that all human experience are fundamentally based on biology (since our meat seems to be all we have, at least until some extra-corporeal notion such as the soul is itself capable of being measured, analyzed, and reasoned about), then, fundamentally, our individual subjective experiences are based on what would likely be common chemistry and biology.
So back to the original comment: Is consciousness a real state? We identify it as such, but perhaps it is several, perhaps many, cooperative or even competitive microstates, if you will, all of which together give us the experience of consciousness, but which are inaccessible to us...
...just as the perception of individual hues and saturations within our eyes are inaccessible, since they reach "us" after considerable backend processing (literally, since visual processing is largely occipital).
If we are going to make progress on understanding consciousness, we first need to set it aside and ask "what is going on?" at various levels, then, eventually, draw a complete picture from those dots....