Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

For the last time, the subjective experience itself that everyone believes in is not an illusion even if the specific kind of consciousness some people believe in is a delusion or many aspects of what they experience is not what they think it is and are illusory. Their subjective experience itself is not an illusion. By redefining consciousness Dennett isn't addressing it he's addressing something else altogether and using the same word. So he can't make any arguments against consciousness until he actually talks about consciousness rather than his labelling of something else as "consciousness".

It's not fucking rocket science. If you're part of a debate and you label something else as the topic you're not part of the topic. If we're debating about religion and Dennett walks in eating ice cream and decides to call his ice cream "religion"... he can't pretend to be part of the debate if all he talks about is ice cream and likes to call it religion.

Yeah, sure, Dennett, your "religion" is ice cream. Fuck your religion and fuck your consciousness.

Strawson couldn't be more on the ball when he says Dennett looking-glasses words. I think it's absolutely excellent to have a term for exactly the stupid shit Dennett does when he completely fails to address a subject altogether and makes a career out of it by talking about things that are associated with it without addressing it itself.

His books are full of paragraphs of digressions and misdirections and obfuscations and he really doesn't like saying what he really means.

Take a look at Dennett's position on the matter of free will. After many many years he was pushed to get more and more clear about what he was actually saying until he eventually gave a talk where he literally admits that to him free will is like money, it's a social construct.

He may as well just say "the will is not free but I still wish to call it "free will" anyways."

And with consciousness he may as well say "I am not interested in actually addressing consciousness but I am interested in addressing many things associated with it and calling that "consciousness". Don't mind me when I pretend to be addressing it okay?"

Just... such an uber fail.

Here there is a wonderful irony, for the false naturalists – even as they doubt or deflate or deny the existence of experience, and revile Descartes, their favourite target, for being an outright realist about experience – are themselves in the grip of a fundamentally Cartesian conviction: the conviction that experience can’t possibly be physical, that matter can’t possibly be conscious. The irony is fierce because Descartes was at bottom aware that one can’t rule out the possibility that matter may be conscious. Many of the false naturalists, by contrast, have no such doubts.

Some of them will deny this. They will insist that they do admit the existence of consciousness or experience, and do allow that it can be physical. But they do this by changing the meaning of the word ‘conscious’ into something that involves no consciousness. They ‘looking-glass’ the term, by which I mean use it in such a way that whatever they mean by it, it excludes what the term actually means.

My bold

I'm done. It can't get any clearer than that how wrong you are. But sure, go ahead and keep going on and on about how you can't trust traditional terms and comparing subjective experience to souls, blah blah blah, you're so obviously wrong about subjective experience and consciousness it's laughable.