Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

It's a mistake and unparsimonious to think that consciousness is both consciousness of being conscious and also consciousness of something else. There's a barrier between our minds and external reality. We can only experience things how they seem to us.

You say that consciousness is not only the awareness of how things seem to us because it's both consciousness of the intentional subject and the consciousness of being conscious. But by following Satre like that you are being dualistic in that you are creating a dividing line between the experiencer and the experience. You are making the very mistake that Dennett tries to warn people against. And Dennett's failed solution is to say that consciousness is illusory because he thinks only physical things can be real and he thinks that illusions in consciousness means the consciousness itself is an illusion.

So you're either failing to notice the very real distinction between internal and external reality or you're equivocating between the two and helping yourself to dualistm without realizing it. Pretending there's a distinction between the expereince and the experiencer when there isn't.

Our conscious self/our consciousness is a bundle of qualia that is experienced in the brain. You can't pretend that there's both the experience of the internal world and the experience of the external world because all experience is experienced internally as consciousness. It's the very notion of a conscious 'self' (Dennett refers to it as a homunculous and he's right about this part) that is an illusion, not consciousness or conscious experience itself. There is no dividing line between the experiencer and all experience is subejctive. The brain cannot literally detect and experience the external world, it can only experience its own interpretations of what seems to be an external world which it cannot know for sure even exists as a real external world.

And at any given moment whether you're observing the perception of your own thinking (you're introspecting) or you're observing your own perception of what you perceive to be an external world (you're extrospecting)... you can only do one or the other. And in both cases what you're conscious of is your own perception and how things seem to you, whether it's directed at your own model of what seems to be external or whether it's directed at your own model of what seems to be your own introspection. Which is identical to how you really do experience your introspection. In both cases, the experience of an apparent external world and the experience of an apparent introspective internal world: the appearance of it as your conscious experience is identical to what your conscious experience simply is at the time.

One of the key differences between me and Bennyboy is that he helps himself unparsimoniously to dualism. And you, Jor, are being similarly unparsimonious and dualistic by believing in the illusion of the self and the dividing line between the experience and the experiencer, the false distiniciton you mention that Satre points out. Ironically you're believing in the very homunculus that Dennett warns against. And his warning against that is something he actually got right.

Someone criticizies Dennett saying that it's not as though Dennett is saying that the emperor has no clothes it's as though he is saying the clothes have no emperor and he says they're right. And he is indeed right if he's talking about a homunculous or a conscious self/experiencer that is seperate from the conscious experience. But it can't be applied to conscious experience itself and be said that even conscious experience is an illusion. That would be to say that not only do the clothes haven no emperor but the clothes, which are analogous to qualia in this analogy, aren't even 'really' experienced. And that they're not 'really' there. And even the clothes themselves are illusion. That would be a nonsensical mistake. And yet by saying that conscious experience itself is an illusion rather than it merely being the notion that there is a homunclous that lives in our consciousness that is the illusion, Dennett is making a mistake. Because consciousness itself can't be an illusion even when people are deluded and think that there is a homunculous or separate 'expereincer' from their experience involded (which is more of a delusion than an illusion... we don't even perceive what we think we perceive. Illusions have to be perceived, but the homunculous isn't. No one ever experiences a conscious 'experiencer' in their consciousness seperate from the conscious experience itself... they incoherently believe they do because of their own amateur faliure to make sense of or explain their consciousness. That's an example of 'folk psychology' that really is bullshit.). Or even when they think that they can be conscious of external objective reality as it really is as opposed to how it merely appears in their own consciousness, making it still subjective internal reality experienced as external objective reality rather than it actually being external objective reality. And no matter how deluded they are about thinking that what they are experiencing now isn't what happened a moment ago when it is... that appearance or experience is still happening in that exact moment, even if what it represents actually happened a moment ago. And the appearance is the consciousness. Consciousness does indeed take time to be experienced but it's only consciousness when it's being experienced because consciousness is experiential in nature. It doesn't matter if we're talking about brain states that were present before the consciousness, the part of the brain state that appears to the consciousness in the moment is the consciousness. The parts of the brain that in the moment are appearing as consciousness are identical to those parts of the brain in the moment. They are entirely physical and experienced mentally but that mental experience is still physical in substance, that's simply not how it appears to us. It doesn't make it any less real. In fact, the way it appears to us is more knowable and real than the external reality and external brain that seems to be there.

You can't say that both the conscious and unconscious parts of the brain are conscious (Note: When I mention 'the conscious parts of the brain' I'm not saying that some parts of the brain are specific parts of the brain that 'become conscious', nor am I even saying that specific static parts of the brain, and always those specific parts in those specific places, are identical to consciousness. I'm not saying there are special conscious centers in the brain and I am certainly not saying that there is any Cartesian Theatre. I agree with Dennett that there is no specific part of the brain where consciousness 'comes together' and I agree with Dennett that there are no special conscious centres in the brain. I also agree with Dennett that the brain doesn't 'generate' consciousness. And I agree with him that there is no extra step and I agree with him about his multiple drafts theory in that the brain is competing with itself and vying for attention and whatever parts that win are just experienced as consciousness. That's how we perceive consciousness. My point is that that very perception is the consciousness and that certainly doesn't make it an illusion. What I don't agree with him about is his non-sequitur that therefore consciousness is illusory because it's something experienced as non-physical when in 'reality' it's physical. So the non-physical experience he concludes must be an 'illusion'. No, the experience is the most certainly known thing in the universe, and is physical itself like the rest of reality. Just because we experience it differently doesn't mean it's any less real. In fact, we have zero knowledge of physical reality outside of our own conscious experience of it (our conscious experience of it also being wholly physical... in fact everything we ever think we're studying is actually us only studying our own consciousness. We only ever experience conscious phenomenal objects and this is all science can address. The unconscious noumenal world is unreachable by definition and therefore absolutely unfalsifiable and unverifiable. Science doesn't ever test, verify, falsify or study the external objective world it tests, verifies, falsifies and studies how we (or scientists) experience the external world. The entirety of science is phenomenological). Our experience of consciousness isn't this illusory alien thing that doesn't appear to map onto physical reality so it must be an illusion experienced by a physical brain. It is the most known and familar aspect of the physical, in fact the only physical aspect that we can truly be certain of as being real and experience directly.(even if how we appear to experience the external world is an illusion and 'real reality' underneath is actually The Matrix... our subjective experience itself is very real, even if it's just false memories of things that never happened, the experience of that false memory itself is at least real and knowable) That is simply how our physical brain is experienced. There's no illusion. It's a nonsense for him to conclude that consciousness itself is an illusion and can't be real because he thinks it seems non-physical and all of real reality is physical. (He thinks it seems non-physical and so he thinks it is an illusion but it doesn't seem non-physical he just thinks it does. It's a delusion on his part, not an illusion on anyone's part. You can be deluded about the way things seem to you but a delusion and illusion is not the same thing. You can think something seems to you a way that it doesn't, that doesn't change the reality of how things really seem to you regardless of your delusion). He's explanations about the brain are right. (And the delusion of the homunculous, Caretesian theater, emperor or the conscious expereincer as seperate from the experience. He's got all that right. All those concepts are indeed silly and pathetic naive folk-psychology. But they are delusions, not illusions. We don't expereince that homuncuolous just because we think we do. The whole point is that there is no homunculous, not even as an illusion, we just think there is because of failures in logic and explanation and failures in our own sense-making of our own consciousness). But his re-definitions of consciousness and non-sequiturs about the so-called 'illusion' of conscious experience itself are epic fails. He's not right about everything.

And the point is that the parts of the brain that seem to be conscious from the first person perspective is identical to the experience of consciousness. I'm not talking about experiments done on the brain that 'seem' to indicate the parts of the brain that are consciousness from a third person perspective. That indication itself only seems to be the case to the people studying the brain and that seeming that they are experiencing is their own consciousness.