I’ll reply to the quote above and to the message from Introduce yourself! - #183 by alastair
Dennet points to a lack of a good philosophical framework from which to address qualia. I largely agree with that but that is not a good reason to ignore the concerns that are associated with not having a good philosophical framework. Philosophy goes through paradigm shifts like science and that only happens when the current frameworks are ineffective and people continue to ask questions. I think Dennet also goes into the bucket of philosophers claiming to have answers but actaully providing a meaningles performance, so I double your Dennet with a Dennet 
Dennet seems to consider himself a verificationist which is a limited perspective for a philosopher as it basically makes his philosophy a subset of what science can empirically verify. Philosophy has potential value in being broader than science and pointing out where science is in need of a paradigm shift e.g. the empirical verificationist paradigm runs into limits in regards to qualia. Philosophy itself has a paradigm shift on the cards, raised by issues around qualia.
Dennet is probably not a very welcome voice for an HTM believer because Dennet claims people like Jeff are underestimating the diffculties of generally intelligent machines by orders of magnitude. Given that Jeff claims to have the key pieces of the puzzle in place there is an obvious tension there.
@alastair, in the model of TBT I guess the correlation with qualia of red is distributed across thousands of different populations of neurons. The idea that you have a population that maps to “red” does not fit with TBT. If you push your idea to an extreme, imagine you could identify “red” neurons (i.e. that correlate with a particular red experience reported by someone) and you could scoop them out, put them in a dish, and then stimulate them to behave in the same way, where would the red experience be then?