On further reflection, I’m not certain that your position and mine are incompatible. I’m a personal identity skeptic in roughly the same sense that you’re a qualia skeptic. Yet, if somebody points out that a door is open when it was previously closed, and reasons “someone must have opened it”, I don’t consider that reasoning invalid. I just think the need to modify the word “someone” if they want to be absolutely pedantically correct about what occurred. Similarly, your skepticism about qualia doesn’t really contradict my claim that the objects of a computer simulation would have no (or improper ) qualia; at worst it means that I ought to slightly modify my description of what it is that those objects wouldn’t have.
On further reflection, I’m not certain that your position and mine are incompatible. I’m a personal identity skeptic in roughly the same sense that you’re a qualia skeptic. Yet, if somebody points out that a door is open when it was previously closed, and reasons “someone must have opened it”, I don’t consider that reasoning invalid. I just think the need to modify the word “someone” if they want to be absolutely pedantically correct about what occurred. Similarly, your skepticism about qualia doesn’t really contradict my claim that the objects of a computer simulation would have no (or improper ) qualia; at worst it means that I ought to slightly modify my description of what it is that those objects wouldn’t have.