Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

It's not an appeal to tradition. It's acknowledging the fact that if it seems we are conscious then we are conscious.

It's akin to an appeal to the fact that squares have four sides.

You are completely ignoring the category error that Dennett and the rest of the elimitavists are making in their conflating ontological subjectivity with epistemic subjectivity. You are completely ignoring the fact that our being mistaken about the nature of consciousness does not and cannot make consciousness itself an illusion.

You're a fuckwit. I'm done explaining to you the logical equivalent of squares necessarily having four sides.

And as for epiphenomenalism... science supports it. There have been multiple experiments that we act as much as 7 seconds before we become consciously aware of our actions... that is clear evidence supporting the hypothesis that consciousness has no evolutionary utility because it is is a mere side effect of unconscious processing that does have evolutionary utility. Just like when moths kill themselves on flames... that act has zero evolutionary utility... it's just a side effect of their flight mechanism that does have evolutionary utility.

A large body of neurophysiological data seems to support epiphenomenalism. Some of the oldest such data is the Bereitschaftspotential or "readiness potential" in which electrical activity related to voluntary actions can be recorded up to two seconds before the subject is aware of making a decision to perform the action. More recently Benjamin Libet et al. (1979) have shown that it can take 0.5 seconds before a stimulus becomes part of conscious experience even though subjects can respond to the stimulus in reaction time tests within 200 milliseconds. Recent research on the Event Related Potential also shows that conscious experience does not occur until the late phase of the potential (P3 or later) that occurs 300 milliseconds or more after the event. In Bregman's Auditory Continuity Illusion, where a pure tone is followed by broadband noise and the noise is followed by the same pure tone it seems as if the tone occurs throughout the period of noise. This also suggests a delay for processing data before conscious experience occurs. Popular science author Tor Nørretranders has called the delay "The User Illusion" implying that we only have the illusion of conscious control, most actions being controlled automatically by non-conscious parts of the brain with the conscious mind relegated to the role of spectator.

The scientific data seem to support the idea that conscious experience is created by non-conscious processes in the brain (i.e., there is subliminal processing that becomes conscious experience). These results have been interpreted to suggest that people are capable of action before conscious experience of the decision to act occurs. Some argue that this supports epiphenomenalism, since it shows that the feeling of making a decision to act is actually an epiphenomenon; the action happens before the decision, so the decision did not cause the action to occur.