Like, I assume that I am a neural net predicting things and deciding things and if you had full access to my brain you could (in principle, given sufficient time) understand everything that was going on in there. But, like, one way or another I experience the perception of perceiving things.

To me this is a bit like the claim of someone who claimed psychic powers but still wanted to believe in physics who would say, "I assume you could perfectly well understand what was going on at a behavioral level within my brain, but there is still a datum left unexplained: the datum of me having psychic powers."

There are a number of ways to respond to the claim:

• We could redefine psychic powers to include mere physical properties. This has the problem that psychics insist that psychic power is entirely separate from physical properties. Simple re-definition doesn't make the intuition go away and doesn't explain anything.
• We could alternatively posit new physics which incorporates psychic powers. This has the occasional problem that it violates Occam's razor, since the old physics was completely adequate. Hence the debunking argument I presented above.
• Or, we could incorporate the phenomenon within a physical model by first denying that it exists and then explaining the mechanism which caused you to believe in it, and talk about it.

In the case of consciousness, the third response amounts to Illusionism, which is the view that I am defending. It has the advantage that it conservatively doesn't promise to contradict known physics, and it also does justice to the intuition that consciousness really exists.

I'd prefer to taboo 'Qualia' in case it has particular connotations I don't share. Just 'that thing where Ray perceives himself perceiving things, and perhaps the part where sometimes Ray has preferences about those perceptions of perceiving because the perceptions have valence.'

To most philosophers who write about it, qualia is defined as the experience of what it's like. Roughly speaking, I agree with thinking of it as a particular form of perception that we experience.

However, it's not just any perception, since some perceptions can be unconscious perceptions. Qualia specifically refer to the qualitative aspects of our experience of the world: the taste of wine, the touch of fabric, the feeling of seeing blue, the suffering associated with physical pain etc. These are said to be directly apprehensible to our 'internal movie' that is playing inside our head. It is this type of property which I am applying the framework of illusionism to.

The reason I care about any of this is that I believe that a "perceptions-having-valence" is probably morally relevant.

I agree. That's why I typically take the view that consciousness is a powerful illusion, and that we should take it seriously. Those who simply re-define consciousness as essentially a synonym for "perception" or "observation" or "information" are not doing justice to the fact that it's the thing I care about in this world. I have a strong intuition that consciousness is what is valuable even despite the fact that I hold an illusionist view. To put it another way, I would care much less if you told me a computer was receiving a pain-signal (labeled in the code as some variable with suffering set to maximum), compared to the claim that a computer was actually suffering in the same way a human does.

Are you saying the my perceiving-that-I-perceive-things-with-valence is an illusion, and that I am in fact not doing that? Or some other thing?

Roughly speaking, yes. I am denying that that type of thing actually exists, including the valence claim.