Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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We must say it, or we are saying something self-contradictory.  A person cannot be self aware "in the now" by any coherent materialistic description.

This is fair enough.  The idea of self, if it is to be experienced, must be fed to that which is conscious through a series of memory and other brain functions.

But cut the "self," and I'd argue that all awareness must be in the present-- it's just awareness OF things that happened (or at least were processed) in the past.

Delaying the inevitable reduction, in the view eliminative materialists.  If consciousness is a story told about past processing, you aren't experiencing anything in the moment, not even being presently aware of past moments.  The feeling of being presently aware -is- one of those narratives of past processing.

The self, in that viewpoint, has been described as the center of gravity of that post processing narrative. It;s not an actual thing, or even an event that actually occurred. It's just the binding referent that makes all of the narratives applicable to the viewer. In this way, it's a useful fiction. A beneficial (or at least neutral) user-illusion, as it were.

As to something being fed to that which is conscious, that, in the view of eliminative materialists, is an incoherent proposition from the outset. What is the concious bit, and what is the unconscious bit? What is being fed to what, at what point does information processing become consciousness? An eliminative materialist might say that there is no such point. There is no there in there, and no singular conscious entity being fed non-conscious processing, in there, either. Comments to that effect are an invocation of the cartesian theater, the humonculus. Subtle dualism.

In a monist view, the consciousness must be exactly synchonized with the brain function since they are said to be one and the same, n'est-ce pas?

Hardly? Eliminative materialism is a monist view, and does not require such synchronicity. In fact, it flatly denies that there is or can be any such synchronicity. Instead, it proposes that what we call consciousness is distributed in time and space, only cobbled together afterward (and not all at once even then) in seeming synchronicity. The seeming itself, not just the objects that seem like x or y, is flawed..and this is why consciousness is referred to, in that context, as illusory.

In the eliminative materialist view, consciousness-as-described and brain function -aren't- said to be one and the same. That's the defining proposition of the position..that some mental states that many of us believe in do not, will not, and cannot map to discrete mental states. They're not different things, or the same thing.....one of them is no-thing.....

Ergo, people trying to explain how that no-thing operates are always going to be in error. A giant waste of time, in their opinion. It's the very insistence on the reality of this fiction, and the insistence that this fiction is an unimpeachable object (even though all the other objects are impeachable............?), that inexorably leads to problems, and bad explanations. You, for example, maintain that materialism is wrong...because it can't explain the ghost in the machine (just one of your examples..granted). If there -is- no ghost in the machine to explain...what happens to that claim?