Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

I admit I mostly skimmed all of your and Khem's posts, but I noticed this bit about what is perceived doesn't happen simultaneous with the actual world events.
This reminded me of the concept of Real-Time Control... essentially, to act fast enough so that the system doesn't change from when it was sensed to the time of acting upon it.

So, as I see it, the time it takes for our brains to process information and make a conscious decision is, for the most part, irrelevant. We operate in Real-Time.
Our present is a present with a small and mostly irrelevant delay.

It may be mostly irrelevant to it's operation (eliminative materialists don't think, for example, that this delay causes it not to work) - but it is very relevant with regards to an accurate description -of- that work..and whether or not that accurate description matches our experience and descriptions of it.

In their view, that's just one of many discrepancies between consciousness as-described...as-experienced, and what our brains are actually doing.

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It's not irrelevant to point out the incoherence of your statement that consciousness never happens in the present but it does happen in the past.

Your denial that consciousness is or can be happening is even more retarded than denying that its happening is non-illusory.

The alternative is to propose that the product of information processing can travel between points in zero time.

...so your saying that there is happeneds but not happenings is logically incoherent.

-I'm- saying that consciousness is (and can only be) information processing that happened, rather than something that -is- happening as we experience it to be. More damningly, what was happening bears no resemblance to our description of it in any case.  So start over, again, from there.  

To say it doesn't exist is to say you're not conscious. To say it's not real is to say you're not experiencing it. And the experience of consciousness is what consciousness is. It's neither the case that you're not conscious or you're not experiencing consciousness.

LOLNO, Ham, just no.  I'm saying (and dennet was saying) that consciousness doesn't exist as described and insisted upon by people who don't realize that they are proposing a humonculus with an attached system capable of processing in zero time.  This has been explained to you from the outset, and yet you persist.  Start over from there.  

I'd prefer you to recognize your own incoherent statements including the false dichotomy you are setting up.

Imagine a world in which you are wrong, and have completely lost the pulse of what I, and eliminative materialists are saying..if you ever had it, and start over from there.

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Sure there's a happening.  I'm experiencing percept A, and then I'm experiencing percept B.  That is happening.

Sorry, missed you in the shuffle.  You can't be "experiencing percept a".  The experience, itself, is necessarily delayed in time.  It can't be something that you're presently doing, it can be something that you've done and experience-as the present.  You think and feel as though it is happening, but in truth, it already happened.  You couldn't have access to the product of that processing (even if there were a humonculus -or- an element x), unless it had already been done, because it would not yet exist.

I've said that consciousness is the awareness of the fact of awareness.  In this thread, people keep talking about the NATURE of consciousness-- insisting it must be X, and then demonstrating that X cannot be mapped onto any physical system or property and is therefore an "illusion" or "does not exist."

-and just in that extremely sparse definition you've managed to be wrong about a basic attribute of that experience.  You cannot be aware, in the present tense, of awareness.  That awareness, itself, must have also been processed.  You are getting a picture of time, not a video feed.  The seeming itself, is not what it seems to be. You can, however, posess a story about what you felt like at that time, cobbled together after the fact, cobbled together after you have access to that processing. The delay may be "no-time" to you.......but..........

But consciousness isn't an object of inquiry.  We verbalize it, then talk about the verbalizations as a proxy for the actual happening of the coordination of percepts.


There are a lot of maybes, and they are sometimes fun to talk about.    But not everyone has such an elevated interest in the semantics we usually turn over.  Most people wake up, look around, and occasionally wonder what it means.  No very useful philosophy is going to happen when mind, in its capacity or even tendency toward irony, decides that mind is an illusion.

When mind decides that some descriptions of mind are an illusion..you mean....?  Like the illusion of zero time processing fed to a nonexistent humonculus?  Ultimately, this entire thread has been about that simple, initial, misapprehension.  Call consciousness x, and it;s easy to see the mistake.

Eliminative materialists think that x exists.  There, all comments regarding the notion that they deny the existence of x are handled.  Eliminative materialists think that some descriptions of x, don't exist.  That those descriptions, instead of being x, are a compelling misapprehension produced by the system that is x.  Illusions. You are not, for example..."aware of awareness". Your brain has access to a post processing narrative, with the narrative center of gravity, and referent time that, to you..seems to be the present even though it cannot be.

Whatever you are seeing in front of you, like whatever you are thinking..didn't -and couldn't- be happening now. It took time for signals to go from your eyes to your brain..and in that time, whatever moment they represent has passed. It also took time for signals to travel -around- your brain...and in that time, whatever moment they represent has also passed. You sense of being aware, in the present tense, of awareness - again present tense-..is not and cannot be an accurate description of consciousness.....but ofc you still feel that way. So do I. So do eliminative materialists. We all acknowledge that we report feeling that way. It;s just that this report is necessarily in error. It cannot be what it reports itself as. Sure, sure, consciousness is often mistaken with regards to the objects it perceives.....but when consciousness is mistaken regarding it's own self-report...that's a little more pernicious. The proposition of eliminative materialists is not that nothing is happening in the brain, that there is no processing, for example presently happening at some time y......but that what we describe as consciousness does not or cannot map to a discrete mental state, that it does not match with what processing -is- happening at that time y.