Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

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.

We agree 100% there.

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.

This maverick philosopher guy truly is an idiot because his so called propositions have other propositions smuggled into them.

So-called "propostion (2)" is two propositions. One is just true by definition: it states that our consciousness is subjective in nature. And the other is that consciousness can't be physical. Which is just a non-sequitur.

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.

The problem with proposition two is not that it is a "stubborn insistence on parsimony.". Parsimony is never wrong because when evidence contradicts it that actually makes something else compatively more parsimonious.

The problem with proposition (3) is it presumes that physicalism/materialism has to be so reductionistic as to suggest that consciousness can eventually be explained in physical properties. But this particular popular version of physicalism is not the only one... and it makes far more sense to instead just believe that consciousness itself is physical like everything else.

Those people who believe in either a radical emergence or say that consciousness can be explained eventually by physical stuff of a completely different nature... both those groups of people are actually being rather dualistic without realizing it.