Consciousness Trilemma

[Angrboda]

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.

No I am not. I am differentiating different aspects of consciousness, not availing myself of dualism. There is manifestly an aspect of consciousness that is about itself while you are having intentionality of a subject. Can you answer the question, "Were you conscious ten seconds ago?" If you can, then obviously you were aware that you were aware at the time. That's all that is necessary to show that point. The rest of this is just meaningless posturing.

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.

Your tactic is to totalize the discussion by denying that differences exist where they do in fact exist. Of course all experience is subjective. That's not saying anything. You completely misunderstand Sartre's point and cast it in your totalizing language. Our consciousness is a bundle of qualia, and some of those qualia have the apparent referent of consciousness itself. This is not using dualism to introduce a dividing line between the experiencer and the experience, it is simply taking note of what's there. This idea that consciousness of consciousness is the same as introspection is simply not true. Your lack of imagination has led you down the primrose path to yet another false dichotomy.

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.

That's the false dichotomy I was speaking of. If you aren't aware of being aware, how are you aware that you are aware of something external? Extrospection must include this "being aware of being aware" or else we would have no conscious experience at all.

One of the key differences between me and Bennyboy is that he helps himself unparsimoniously to dualism. And you, Jor, are being similarly parsimonious 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.

More irrelevant posturing.

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 merely the notion that there is a homunclous that lives in our consciousness 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.).

More meaningless posturing.

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.

And you imply that you aren't guilty of word salad expressions. This is nothing but. Your claim that I'm availing myself of dualism is nothing but rubbish assertion followed by a lot of posturing (and I do mean a lot).