Consciousness Trilemma

[Neo-Scholastic]

1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.

Here are my thoughts on the matter. Proposition (1) is based on incorrigible experience. To deny (1) is the kind of schoolboy sophistry that takes contrarian hubris so far that it is willing to embrace self-contradiction and present it as some grand and unassailable philosophical Truth. People who deny (1) are not serious thinkers.

Proposition (2) seems to mask a couple of underlying assumptions. It is true that any given subject has privileged access to their own conscious experience of external objects. In a sense that is always true of relationships between all physical objects. The bright side of the moon has "privileged access" to light from the sun that its dark side does not. At the same time, attributing axiological and intentional properties to physical objects presupposes some consciousness already having those properties. Doing otherwise violates the principle that something cannot give what it does not already have.

Proposition (3) is a preferred ontological stance inferred largely from prior experience and perceived parsimony. Parsimony is a useful guide, one best not suppose unnecessary elements in an explanation, but it doesn't rule out complexity or redundancies, and a stubborn insistence on parsimony can commit one to positing too few elements and ignoring the benefits of additional ones.

So from my perspective, only (1) is foundational while both (2) and (3) required a little more work to deserve warrant. While it is intuitive, holding on to proposition (2) is mostly a way to avoid a seemingly intractable circularity, but it is not at all clear that will always be the case. One could deny (2) by essentially issuing a promissory note on one's faith in a future solution. Meanwhile proposition (3) only elevates epistemological tools to ontological commitments. Proposition (3)'s warrant rests on pragmatic concerns that are otherwise ontologically neutral.