Consciousness Trilemma

[Angrboda]

(*Hat-tip Maverick Philosopher, here)

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

1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.

The supposition that consciousness is an illusion is all too frequently taken as the absurd claim that consciousness doesn't exist; that we are all zombies. But I don't interpret it this way, and I think it's little more than an appeal to ridicule to do so. In the world of stage magic, an illusion is giving the appearance that something is one thing, say sawing a woman in half, when in reality it is another thing. If we apply this definition to consciousness, then the claim is that consciousness is something other than it appears. This appearance of consciousness includes the following: that it is unified; exists as a point in space; exists in the present moment; and so on. If consciousness is viewed as a process of some sort, then none of these attributes can actually be real. So the person that is claiming that consciousness is not an illusion is indirectly claiming that it is not a result of a process; that it is a thing in itself. This entails ontological commitments to the existence of a unique entity that is totally unlike the physical entities with which we are familiar. I don't think most non-illusion advocates are aware of the ontological commitments they are taking on. It's true that parsimony is a heuristic and not a law, and even at that is frequently misinterpreted. However, I think that taking such an ontological stance is not only against the law of parsimony, it is an extravagant addition to our ontological repertoire. Gods? Souls? Consciousnesses? How manyfold must the ontological categories multiply before it is recognized as absurd? This is the defeater for #1.

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

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.

Perhaps, but it's also quite possible that all three are false.