Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

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.

The photon encoding which results in my experience of Casablanca on a reel-to-reel screening is long gone. However, I'm still experiencing Casablanca now-- this is because all that processing, whatever its nature or form, allows the information to navigate its way through time to the moment when the projector (and my mind) bring them back together. You wouldn't argue that the projector has traveled back in time, or cannot be located in time, simply because the content it presents is rooted in the past.

-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's right, you cannot be aware of current consciousness, if you treat that awareness as the object of an inquiry, attempt to subject it to observation, compare it to your world view, and so on. But none of those things are actually consciousness anyway-- they are information or ideas ABOUT consciousness.

When you verbalize ideas about consciousness, you instantiate it-- i.e. you take a kind of template and manifest it into an entity (it's a computer term about classes, btw). So in the end, when it comes to discussion, we can only look into the past and say. . . "At that moment, I was aware of percept X."

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.

This isn't my argument, so I don't feel much like defending it.

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.

I didn't say I'm aware of awareness, or I shouldn't have. I think (and should have) defined the word "consciousness" as the awareness of awareness. There's no agency there, certainly not a self-aware human agency. There's really only the fact of qualia, and the semantic-- that for a subjective view to be allowed for in the Universe, there has to be something capable of subjective agency. Whether that's a specific brain part and function or a ghost in the gears or an illusion doesn't really matter too much, so long as the experiencing goes on.

Whatever you are seeing in front of you, like whatever you are thinking..didn't -and couldn't- be happening now.

This is content. I have clearly distinguished between consciousness and the objects of consciousness, so you shouldn't be making these kinds of examples any more. By "awareness" I don't mean "thinking about." I mean something much more primitive than that.

I've described consciousness as meta-awareness, but maybe it would be more simply viewed as meta-qualia: what's it's like for experiences to be experienced.

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.

It's not a very interesting proposition to me, because I'm substance agnostic anyway. If someone wants to start with what I call consciousness, and then shed light on how brain function relates to it, I'm down with that. However, if someone wants to nail down a physical description and then fail (wink wink nudge nudge) to find it, then they are just chasing their own tails.