Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

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.

Even an illusion needs a host, since an illusion is a malformed perception. Tell me, who/what is experiencing the illusion? Does the illusion experience the illusion? This starts to sounds like philosophical Buddhism or Hinduism, and very much not like a material monist view of mind.

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.

This feels a bit like an appeal to ignorance-- we don't know exactly what/where that essential element of consciousness is so. . .

If you are saying that we are not conscious OF the past, but rather IN the past, then what does time even mean? Obviously, depending on where various sensations are sourced, they may have been in process for billions of years. Then the mind draws those sensations available to it at a given moment-- however old they may happen to be or how they were arrived that-- into a coordinated experience.

We don't need to know exactly how those sensations are drawn together, and it really only matters if you are trying to fit mind into a particular view of materialism which doesn't easily allow for it.

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.

Seeming can't be flawed, when we are talking about something which is defined by the fact of seeming. The fact is that if I experience things together, there is at least one context in which those things are together. You can pull the Monty Python parrot trick for a while, but trying to explain mind by saying that mind has got it all wrong isn't really going to get us very far.

If there -is- no ghost in the machine to explain...what happens to that claim?

Sometimes with enough words, you can obscure even the most basic truths from view, so that you take a world of ink as reality. Then you say-- see, X is nowhere to be seen!

I'm willing to take it as brute fact that mind is real. You can call it illusion if you want, but that's just a word. My response is simply to plug in the word "illusion" to all my interests and questions about the nature of mind. On what does this illusion rest? What is the exact mechanism of this illusion? What is it about the Universe that allows for this illusion? How will a material world view incorporate this illusion into a complete understanding of reality?

The same goes for "seeming," which is perfectly fine for me, because I'd define qualia as experiencing how things seem. Why is there seeming? From what processes does seeming arise, and in what way does the capacity for physical systems to experience "seeming" matter in the way the Universe grinds through its many processes?