Consciousness Trilemma

[Angrboda]

Sure, sure.  We're not the ones addressing an irrelevant restatement of the original claim.  Conscious experience being an illusion doesn't mean that whatever way it appears to us is not the way it appears to us, it's saying that the way it appears to us is not the way it is.  And your restatement of the original claim is a bollocks misinterpretation of what we have been saying, and of the original claim.

Does conscious experience have an appearance?  How could that be the case?  It seems to me that consciousness is an awareness of the fact of awareness.  What illusory view can one hold of that?

Apparently you've fallen into the same sinkhole as Hammy. Of course consciousness has an appearance, it is all about its 'appearing' and nothing else. Do you feel that your consciousness exists on the other side of town? No, it has a distinct appearance of occurring inside your head. Consciousness is an awareness of the fact of awareness, but it is not only that. It in its subjectivity implicitly postulates various things about its existence. Is your consciousness unified or not? That's an appearance. Does it occur in the moment or is it spread out in time? That's an appearance.

Sartre has said that consciousness is both consciousness of something, the intentional subject, but that consciousness is also consciousness of being conscious. It is this second form of conscious intention that is about itself. This is why consciousness has an appearance, because it is its own intentional subject. And there is no anchor on the fidelity of that intentionality to what is. It's not a mirror which reflects an unobstructed subject. It is a construct like all the rest of the features of consciousness. And in no way can we be sure that it isn't misrepresenting itself to itself. If we accept that consciousness is a process occurring in the brain, then it seems unavoidable that certain features of that construct, not only may be untrue, but in fact must be untrue. The alternative to that interpretation is a form of the Cartesian theater, in which consciousness appears as a bubble in a stream of non-conscious material. That's simply postponing the necessary reduction.