Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

There to be experienced by what?  Where is the screen, because, without it, the analogy doesn't hold. I have to ask.  Is consciousness like a movie, a multimedia presentation? Is your experience like sound editing?  

Yeah, it's kind of a circle jerk, isn't it? The sense of awareness and the content of experience seem to be mutually defining. The "by what" is "whatever is experiencing the experiences" and the experiences are whatever that thing we just talked about is going through.

I'm not insensitive to that fact. Would it be possible, for example, to have that awareness without any content at all? Sometimes I think that when I'm asleep, there IS a kind of deep philosophical awareness, almost completely contentless-- but of course none of that is centered around the ideas of self and so on that would be required to verbalize it or remember it. Trying to put words to things like that gets deepity or woo pretty fast.

It may be that there is neither an agent nor content, but agent-content, something ambiguous akin to wave-particle or something.

By what, where?  

In the subjective experience.

Or is it alot like a multimedia presentation that's been heavily edited to seem that way?

For the observer, the things in the edited presentation ARE happening together. That they didn't really happen together at their source doesn't matter because a new context is established for them to be brought together.

Where's the after-image?

-exactly?

Okay. You said there was an after-image. Find it, and you've found your consciousness. If you can't find it, then you can't find it-- but I think it's an appeal to ignorance to say, "We can't find it, so it doesn't exist."

To be honest, much of your line of reasoning makes me feel very good about substance pluralist or idealist positions. If you can't find it, it's not where you're looking for it. So where else could it be. You might say, "It isn't. It doesn't exist." But I'm content enough to take my sense of subjective awareness as brute fact, and ask the question: "If it doesn't exist in the framework of your world view, then what is your world view missing?"

I think this is a very legitimate question for material monists, and very many of the theories of mind we discuss are really just complex linguistic remedies to the hard problem of consciousness.