Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

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.

I disagree with these semantics. Consciousness is the awareness of the fact of awareness, and the other things you mentioned are ideas about it.

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.

This consciousness-as-object really isn't consciousness at all. It's an idea of consciousness, a component of the world view. As I said to Hammy, this isn't so much a theory of mind as an extension of the other components of one's world view.

This is especially so in the case of a material monist view, since there's no observation that can be made about the minds of others without begging the question.