Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

OFC I wouldn't, but since I'm not arguing that what relevance does it hold?  Here again we see language that invokes what cannot be.  Projector?  What is it projecting -to-?  The humonculus rears it's ugly head again.   Eliminative materialists don't think that there is no discrete mental state, in time, of processing.  The are skeptical with regards to whatever it is we seem to  think the projector is projecting -to-, to take your terms.    

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.

While that's an interesting way to look at it, it doesn't really argue any point with eliminative materialists, since they're suggesting that what people refer to, experience, and commonly believe to be consciousness -is- what you call "ideas about consciousness".  That they are not the thing, itself, and can be...and are...and must be, in error.

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."

We can also say that a post processing narrative has been constructed with a manufactured point of focus.  That would be more accurate with respect to what the brain is doing, but it also completely contradicts both the terms and tense you used above in quotes, and the very experience we have of being.   

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

-the problem, Benny, was that you weren't accurately relating the argument you were criticizing in that statement.  That, you will have to defend..or abandon.  I'd suggest abandoning it.  

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.

This refinement (I actually don't see any) does not change the comments levied at it from eliminative materialism.  OFC eliminative materialists think that  something exists which is capable of what we call subjective agency.  They don't think that it -is- what it reports itself as, and they don't think that every instance of a reported subjective experience is a legitimate account.  Some, many or most..in their opinion, are the cognitive equivalents of a false memory.  The cognitive equivalent of an afterimage.  There's a picture of the humonculus, not a humonculus.  

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.

What is content...what you see (I agree).....or the brute fact of how it feels to be (I don't agree)...but, in the spirit of agreement, if seeing is the content, and thinking is the content...what's the jar, again, that all of these are in?  Eliminative materialists don't have this jar available to them.  They have to explain consciousness without reference to the jar, or at least explain how it could be possible without the jar.  I think they have..even if, ultimately, there is a jar and we do have it and anything and everything I might reference as a cognitive error are "just the contents".  This, ul;timately, is also what they refer to when they say that positing the jar merely pushes back the necessarry reduction.  If there is a jar, and we have it...does our description and experience of it, of what it feels to be, match how that jar actually works?

Eliminativism is also available to you, in fact...you're going to deploy it below, in describing consciousness as, itself, a brute fact or force related to but distinct from brain.  To "start with consciousness" as it were.  All of this business about how the brainstuff does this and that...would be the artifact or illusion upon which our compelling misapprehension as regards the true nature of consciousness was built.  

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.

- :looks up:........that's shakier than the last one, namely..in that -what it feels like for experiences to be experienced- is exactly what's in error.....? It feels like I'm a little man in my head currently experiencing the present.....

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.

Eliminative materialists think that many explanations of consciousness have failed to find what must be present in order for them to be true, pursuant to that, holding to their definitions of consciousness is to fail before we have begun.