Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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

Well, in the view of eliminative materialists it's not that we don't know where "that element" is, rather..that what we do know rules out the notion that any such element could or -does- exist...and that no such element is required to explain the object or subject that we are discussing. That's the trifecta. Element x cannot be found. There are good reasons that no such thing as element x -could- exist, and element x is not required.

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.

-but we do know where, and when...and it isn't in a single place or time, and it certainly isn't the present...... despite seeming, itself, explicitly depending upon a present moment for a singular observer.  

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.  If you can't find the specific processes or functions which bring them together, this is much less an indictment of the nature of reality than a confession that there isn't currently a good material explanation for consciousness-- something we already know.

If seeming can't be flawed, why does it seem flawed?  In any case, I'll say the same to you that I said to Ham, but elaborate. If you're comfortable with this "seeming" business as being, in actuality, a construct of memory rather than a description of some then-present or now present happening...you're already on the spectrum of what eliminative materialists propose about consciousness.

Really none of the things in this paragraph represent my ideas about this subject.  Certainly, I've said none of them in this thread or in the recent past.  Ergo, I cannot argue any of these points.

I could quote you saying that, over and over, and you know it, lol.  I wasn't trying to argue that point with you, I was trying to show you an area of agreement between you and eliminative materialists.  From that point, obviously, yall diverge from each other. Neither of you thinks that consciousness as-described fits within a materialist position.