Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

I don't think your semantics on this issue are quite right.  Free will is the capacity of the self to express itself in action without undue external influence or impediment.  If the self is arrived at by deterministic processes, and collects information by deterministic processes, then it would be strange indeed if the self could act variably: essentially, free will would be the capacity of the self NOT to act according to its nature, which is obviously a paradox.

When I'm standing in the aisle choosing my candy bar, it doesn't matter to me whether the universe is material, or whether it's deterministic.  For what I am,  that situation is perfectly describable as an act of free will.  "Free will," in fact, is a label for that category of experience, in distinction of other categories wherein I'm unduly influenced in my decision.

OFC you can describe it as such, eliminative materialists take issue with those descriptions, not that you have a feeling.  

In any case, that subtle sort of compatibilist free will isn't really the sort of free will I was touching on.  I'm simply presenting the feeling we have of a classical free will as something that, under specific circumstances (in that case a hard determinist universe), would not only be in error, but be non-existent.  It would be something else that we were experiencing, and then attributing whatever that was to our free will.  As such, we'd never find the "free will" mental state, or the free will neuron, or the free will bundle, or the free will region, because it didn't (and couldn't) exist.  It didn't map to a specific, discrete process or structure.  

It's just an easy example., for someone whop doesn't believe in that sort of free will (like Ham) to understand what elimininativists mean we they call some specific mental state illusory.  They're not saying that you don't see a rabbit being pulled from a hat, they're saying that no rabbit actually -is- being pulled from a hat, and if we look, in our brains, for the rabbit being pulled from a hat, we won't find it.   

The idea of eliminative materialism eliminating the reality of consciousness and calling it an illusion when it's the reality of their consciousness to even know truths about the material world in the first place just shows how retarded eliminative  materialism is when it's directed at consciousness. To say "Oh I seem to be conscious but I'm not really. It's an illusion" is just meaningless contradictory bullshit. The fact that it's true by definition that if we seem to be conscious and consciousness depends on seeming then we're consciousness... is not folk psychology it's the logical equivalent of "a square has 4 sides." By eliminating that aspect consciousness isn't even being addressed.

If I, Ham, defined human consciousness as "the stuff that souls do", would you grant that this type of consciousness exists, or argue against any suggestion that it doesn;t by saying "squares have 4 sides!"?

OFC not.  

Similarly, when an eliminative materialists suggests that people believe in, and believe that they experience particular mental states or advocate for particular descriptions of consciousness, they are describing something that doesn't exist, despite how compellingly it might present itself to us.  Something oes, something that presents itself as such, or presents itself in such a way as to be compellingly in error to us.  It the former, and not the latter, that reductionists are adenying, and none of your criticism of reductionism will really land until you can incorporate that into your understanding.  Eliminitavists don;t think that "nothing" is happening.  They think that some description x is wrong, they think that some mental state x is an artifact (of culture, of language, of cognitive process) and not a legitimate mental state. That no amount of us feeling as though we freely willed some decision is going to translate into us finding a free willing region of the brain.

Similarly, if we experience and describe our consciousness in the context of the cartesian theater, where some humonculus is doing something, They're skeptical that we will actually find that little physical humonculus in the brain. That experience is not only innaccurate, in their view, it is an illusion describing a non-existent thing or process. There is no humonculus for you to experience, for you to feel...so what else could such a feeling -be- but illusory? Is there some other way, other than an actual humonculus, that such a feeling could be produced? They think so. What do you think? Do you require there to be a discrete mental state of "feeling like a humunculus", or even more specifically, do you require there to be a discrete mental state -of- the humonculus itself?

Yes, we experience ourselves as a humonculus, but from what we know, at the moment, of nuerology, that simply is not the case. There is no singular unit, no monolithic location, no central processor, no discrete specific mental state that maps to that feeling of being such. So maybe, just maybe, our description of that feeling, and indeed "how it feels to be" so is in error. In many em views, it's actually a post narrative conglomeration of pieces of -other- legitimate mental states cobbled together and mistaken for some other whole.

So tell me why, Ham, in your view, that can't be illusory, and try to be a little more subject specific than "squares have 4 sides", eh? I think you can understand this, if you want to, and that when you do you'd be able to offer a better criticism, if you were still inclined to do so. I honestly doubt that you -would- still offer criticism, since your disagreement with their position arises, in it's entirety, from a continued insistence on a misunderstanding of the position.