Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

What category error?  You're just spewing philosophical terms without any substance behind them.

The category error I pointed out that Searle pointed out where Dennett conflates ontological subjectivity with epistemic subjectivity, thereby thinking that if something isn't objective scientifically then it can't be real and has to be an illusion.

More philosobabble that doesn't mean anything.  Ontologically subjective?  Wtf does that even mean?

You don't know what ontologically subjective means? How is that my problem? You have Google.

The real debate has passed you by.  Dennett gets into it in the video, but that apparently is beyond you.

Arguments from authority and merely spouting that I don't understand and outright assertions that he gets into it but it's "beyond me". I expected better from you than that.

I notice you fail to address the fact it makes zero sense to say that one is experiencing something nonexistent.

Well, ignoring the straw man for the moment, you've yet to give any reason why this might be so.  When you step beyond your empty predicates, it turns out you're not saying anything at all about consciousness and its character.

I don't have to say anything about consciousness to know that I am experiencing something. I have direct first person awareness of my own subjective experience. I can be completely wrong about what I am experiencing but I can't be wrong about the fact that I am experiencing.

You are effectively saying that I haven't shown that a square has four sides.

You wouldn't know a category error if it bit you in the ass.

How utterly absurd. My greatest intellectual strength is in spotting irrelevant equivocations.

It's ironic that you say all I offer is my own incredulity when I make logical arguments and you respond by saying that Dennett gets into it but it's beyond me and I wouldn't know a cateogry error if it bit me in the ass. All you offer is your own incredulity and bare assertions that I can't know that my own consciousness isn't an illusion. Completely ignoring all my arguments about how it makes zero sense to say that consciousness itself is an illusion regardless of the fact that what we are conscious of may not be what we think we are conscious of. Once again, the fact that we are conscious is not an illusion even if what we are conscious of is not what we think we are conscious of.

Being conscious of something else is still really being conscious of something. Even being conscious of an illusion is really being conscious of an illusion.

Searle did no such thing, he merely unveiled his prejudice against third hand knowledge of subjective experiencing.

He is the one making a distinction between first and third hand knowledge whereas Dennett acts as if first hand experience isn't real and that all that matters is third person knowledge.

I really think this entire subject is simply too subtle for you.  That's why you keep bleating empty slogans.

It's not about beating empty slogans it's about repeating basic logical tautologies while you insist that a square can be circular and all you offer in response is saying that Dennett gets into it but it's beyond me and you outright assert that I wouldn't know a category error if it bit me in the ass even though I've pointed them out repeatedly already.

You literally say Dennett gets into it afterwards, without backing up how he gets into it when he's already said that he thinks it's possible to experience something nonexistent (which is as nonsensical an expressiion as something can get)... and I've explained my views on what he's saying but you just say he gets into it but it's beyond me.

Bare assertions that I don't understand or it's too subtle me or I wouldn't know a category error if it bit me in the ass is what I get from you.

Far from the subject being too subtle for me: no wonder you don't understand the category error in question if you ask me what ontologically subjective "even means". That's the category error I'm addressing and you are insiting Searle is wrong when you don't even know what it means? Talk about the argument from ignorance, Jor. It's got your name on it right now.

Don't ask me what something "even means" and yet at the same time tell me it's not a category error. Is it not an error to you because you don't understand it?

 And your continual redirecting conversation to sentences devoid of any real meaning is just a distraction.

Here you go again with merely asserting that I'm talking philosophical babble without any meaning without actually addressing it.

So it's perfectly okay to assert that I'm saying things without any "real meaning" and to assert that it's not a category error when you don't even know what the category error I'm addressing even means, but when I spell out logically repeatedly why the argument that consciousness itself is an illusion is false by definition I'm just asserting empty claims?

This is unsubstantiated nonsense.  We've already discussed ways in which it appears that cannot be the way in which it is.

You're asking for a third-person substantiation of first-person expereince. So it's your position that's nonsense. This is the category error I'm talking about.

The reality of subjective experience doesn't need to be and cannot be substantiated objectively. That's the whole point. You're not going to substantiate it by addressing something else and giving it the same label.

No we haven't discussed ways in which the reality that we expereince things is an illusion. We have only discussed ways in which the reality of what things we experience can be an illusion in the sense that we can be experiencing other things. You prove my point here:

It would mean that the model by which the brain represents its own process to itself is accurate.  Since it isn't and cannot be, then the 'what' of conscious experience is an illusion.  It's that simple.

This is what I have been saying all along. The WHAT is an illusion but not the THAT.

Now you're just equivocating.  A part of the description of consciousness is that it is occurring in the now.  That's obviously not the case if you are experiencing a memory of an event rather than experiencing the event.

My point went right over your head then. The point is it doesn't matter what you are experiencing or when you are experiencing it.... the fact that you experience anything at all at any time cannot be an illusion. If I think I remember something but it's a false memory about something that never even happened... the experience of that false memory about something that didn't happen is itself an experience that I'm really experiencing.

We can be wrong about the when and the what but we can't be wrong about the that. That's the whole point.

You and Dennett are confusing essence with existence and conflating illusoriness with nonexistence. We can be completely wrong about the essence and reality of something but that doesn't mean we're not experiencing something even if what we are experiencing is completely illusory and not what we think it is and didn't happen when we thought it happened. Even if what we think the experience refers to or represents didn't happen at all, the illusion of it at least happens at the time when we experience that illusion. Illusions are experiential by their very nature.

You're seriously misrepresenting what Dennett was saying.  I watched until the 30 minute mark, and he hadn't yet finished the point he started making at 13:13.  You took an isolated segment out of a longer explanation and declared your misquote as his meaning.  You're being unfair to Dennett and terribly dishonest.  If that is what you think he said, in context, I can only conclude that you're incompetent to interpret anything Dennett says.

This is very pathetic of you. Once again you just tell me I need to watch more and I don't understand rather than bother to explain anything like I have. I've watched that whole talk and you merely assert that I do not understand it.

When your arguments really fail you just resort to telling me it's beyond my understanding. And yet you're the one failing intellectually here.

Tell me how the very notion of experiencing something that doesn't exist can make sense in any way at all without conflating illusioriness with nonexistence.

That isn't even close to conflating the two, as he's talking about different levels of description of the experience.  The red stripe does not in fact exist in the world at large.

Wrong he said it doesn't exist in your brain either. Obviously the illusion of the red stripe exists in the form of neurons.

And yes saying that something is experienced that isn't even there to be experienced is indeed exactly conflating illusoriness with nonexistence. it makes no sense to say you're experiencing something that isn't there in the world or in your brain. If there's nothing there to be experienced then nothing is there to be experienced. Duh. You can't even experience the illusion of something that isn't there at least in your brain in illusory form.

Your experience and things in the world at large are two entirely separate subjects.

Of course they are. And yet he says the illusory afterimage of the red stripe doesn't exist in the world or in your brain. And he still says you are experiencing it. That isn't possible if it doesn't even exist as an illusion in your brain. If that's not conflating illustriousness with nonexistence then nothing is.

 If you mess up something this simple so badly, I have little hope you will ever understand Dennett or eliminative materialism.

You don't even know what "ontological subjectivity" means and yet you still claim Dennett isn't making an error you don't even understand.

If you can't grasp modal logic and the absoluteness of the logical absolutes being true in all universes, and you can't grasp the fact that the real/illusory distinction between real appearances and illusory appearances can't be applied to the entirety of the reality of subjective appearance itself to any real subject... and if you above all don't even understand the arguments I am making then I have little hope for you ever understanding the errors Dennett is making.

Seen as you don't know what ontological subjectivity "even means", here you go:

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective." In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". But the pain itself is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism.

My bold. But I strongly suspect you will once again just assert that something you don't understand is "psychobabble" or tell me things are beyond my understanding since you've got no actual argument.

To be honest you should be able to work out what "ontologically subjective" 'even means' by simply putting the words "ontologically" and "subjective" together and seeing what that means like when someone says anything else to you, but clearly you somehow aren't capable of doing that.

i.e. You should know what "ontologically subjective" means simply by knowing what each word means and putting them together...

It refers to the ontology of subjects as opposed to the ontology of objects. The ontology of first person experience as opposed to third person facts. As opposed to epistemic subjectivity which refers to something that is epistemically unobjective rather than epistemically objective. Ontology is about the question of existence and being and epistemology is about knowledge and theories of justification. This is basic philosophy we're talking about. Just because something ontologically subjective can't be accessed objectively in an epistemic sense doesn't mean that it doesn't really exist at least subjectively in an ontological sense, that's the whole point. That's the category error.