Consciousness Trilemma

[Ben Davis]

Hi Neo,

It appears that of the following three propositions only two can be true:

1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.

Depends how you define 'illusion'. 'I' exist, I'm quite certain of that fact but I'm also certain that I can see everything in my field of vision and we can demonstrate that to be false. It could be that consciousness operates like an old Mainframe Batch Scheduler, organising batch runs in the subconscious with my deliberate thought analogous to an Active Directory. If that were true, then consciousness would be no illusion but a necessary, hierarchic function to coordinate effort. Alternatively, 'I' could be a product of emergence with no particular role but an unintended consequence of neural processing. Given it can be demonstrated that even our deliberate thought seems to be generated and processed by the brain before we're 'consciously' aware of it, 'I' could be a fib told by the brain in order to provide the illusion of coherence to the outside world. That would make my conscious control an illusion because what I think I'm ordering myself to do is what the brain has already decided that I should order myself to do in order for it to seem to the world that I'm ordering myself to do it. I'm aware that I think I'm ordering myself to do it but is that also my brain telling me that I'm aware that I think I'm ordering myself to do it? There's a rabbit hole there that seems to go a long way but does that make 'me' illusionary?

2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.

The first part of the statement is a tautology. I don't think there's any question about the subjectivity of individual experience and awareness. The second part is brimming over with assumptions. As far as can be demonstrated, there are no processes other than 'purely physical' ones. Some of them are subjective, some are objective but all are part of the superset 'purely physical'.

3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.

Well... yes. Consciousness is a property of brains (or similar mass networks) so it's a property of a physical system. Easy!

I must hand it to Maverick Philosopher because this trilemma so neatly identifies and clarifies the dominant positions with respect to philosophy of mind. Like him, I am inclined to accept 1) and 2) which entails that I must reject 3). I have some inkling of where other AF members would place their bets but it would be nice to let people weight in and see where the discussion leads.

The issue is that none of these 3 positions are mutually exclusive so I fail to see any trilemma.