I agree with Strawson's rebuttal, and I do think that Dennett's attitude is fundamentally absurd.

"At present, however, no single model of consciousness appears sufficient to account fully for the multidimensional properties of conscious experience." — "Scholarpedia

To paraphrase: "at present, no single model of consciousness explains what it is that is doing the explaining".

Philosophy does the "thinking about thinking." Questions such as what reason is, which sorts of arguments and beliefs are reasonable or rational, etc. fall in the purview of philosophy. How agents reason, how the cognitive and neural mechanisms operate in their brain (and other relevant systems) when they're thinking is in the purview of cognitive science, neuroscience, and other allied fields. — Arkady

When we are asking questions about the nature of reason, and indeed the nature of consciousness, they are very different kinds of questions as to those about neurology and cognitive sciences. In fact those kinds of questions are what Chalmers calls 'the easy questions' - not because they're not technically very demanding, but because they're amenable to objective description and analysis. They concern factors which can be quantified and measured. Whereas questioning the nature of reason, is questioning the very faculty which makes 'questioning' possible! That is why there is an issue of reflexivity, or recursion, involved in such questions, which is what makes them intractable from a scientific point of view. In other words, that is why they're philosophical, rather than scientific, questions.

So the whole point of Dennett's approach is that there is no difference between the two - that ultimately science can provide answers to philosophical questions. There is nothing genuinely 'first-person' that can't be understood in objective terms. But this leads to numerous absurdities. And also it's fundamentally anti-humanist - deprecating the irreducible nature of first-person experience. As Strawson notes in his reply:

In Consciousness Explained, Dennett allows that it really seems to us that we have such qualia, but insists that it doesn’t follow that we really have them. I argued that this is a false move, because to seem to have qualia is necessarily already to have qualia, and Dennett moved, in his 2007 paper “Heterophenomenology reconsidered,” published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, to the view that there aren’t even any real seemings: “There are no real seemings… judgments are about the qualia of experiences in the same way novels are about their characters. Rabbit Angstrom [in John Updike’s novels] sure seems like a real person, but he isn’t… If materialism is true, there are no real seemings.”

Nor, it follows, are there actually any real beings! When Dennett says that we're 'moist robots' - he's not kidding! We're not actually 'human beings' - we only seem to be!

When we are asking questions about the nature of reason, and indeed the nature of consciousness, they are very different kinds of questions as to those about neurology and cognitive sciences. In fact those kinds of questions are what Chalmers calls 'the easy questions' - not because they're not technically very demanding, but because they're amenable to objective description and analysis. They concern factors which can be quantified and measured. Whereas questioning the nature of reason, is questioning the very faculty which makes 'questioning' possible! That is why there is an issue of reflexivity, or recursion, involved in such questions, which is what makes them intractable from a scientific point of view. In other words, that is why they're philosophical, rather than scientific, questions. — Wayfarer

I agree with most of what you're saying, but the "easy question" pertains to consciousness. I agree that first-person, subjective experience is not something to be captured in a brain scanner, but it doesn't follow that the study of consciousness is ruled out tout court. Science can, and does, study consciousness.

Indeed, and as we have both also agreed, i seem to recall, that this is the subject of cognitive science, which is indeed a fascinating and rich subject, but a different subject to philosophy of mind (even though there are areas in which they illuminate each other,)

I agree that first-person, subjective experience is not something to be captured in a brain scanner, but it doesn't follow that the study of consciousness is ruled out tout court. Science can, and does, study consciousness. — Arkady

Studying the brain with FMRI nonetheless relies on first person reports in order to know what is purportedly being thought, felt or experienced and to correlate that with the areas of observed brain activity.