Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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 agree, assuming that the experience that we're talking about isn't some sort of cognitive error in the first place.  

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.

Hence the utility and compelling nature of a narrative center of gravity..regardless of whether or not it exists as-such.

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

A definite maybe.  

In the subjective experience.

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You understand that an eliminative materialist doesn't have this crutch to fall on, though, right?  They can't posit an "in there" when there is no there, in there.  

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.

It does matter, to a description of consciousness.  In the one, there is an active and present observer..how this little trick plays out and seems to us.  In the other, there is not..there is a composite story of an active observer in the present.  The distinction is profound.  

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."

That's not what they're saying.  They're saying that some mental experiences that most of us believe in do not, or cannot..map to a discrete mental state.  It's not, in their view, that they haven't found it.  In their view, it will not -be- found, because it isn't in there.  There's no there in there, and there's no little man in there.  Nuerons, the things that mental states are made of, not only -aren't- doing what consciousness reports itself as....they can't do what consciousness reports itself as.  

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?"

Again, it's not just an issue of not being able to find it.  What we have found suggests, strongly, that it cannot be done as described, that it cannot exist as described.  That no such bundle of neurons will ever map to this seeming as it reports itself.  Making it, effectively, the ghost in the machine if it does exist as it reports itself.  Thing is, in their opinion, it's not required in order to explain why it seems that way.  

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.

Dennet thinks that a portion of modern materialistic theories of mind rely, silently, on a form of cartesian dualism. Rather than explain how a material structure like a brain arrives at this, they lean on element x and the abilities of the singular entity made of element x in order to plaster their material nothings on top of a description that -sounds- alot like how their experience feels...even if that's not what their brain is actually doing. In truth, it should be -those- theories of mind that make you feel good about idealism or substance dualism. Eliminative materialism is poison to both. Not only are you completely mistaken, in their view...there might not be anything to leverage your mistak in explanation of.

Eliminative materialism is radical in it;s reduction, but uncontroversial in it's premises. Right or wrong, they;re showing other materialists how to -really- stick to it. If you can't find it, and the matter to which you attribute it cannot do what it seems to be doing...then you are wrong, it does not exist as-such. There's either some other..material.... way that it can present itself as such, or it flat out doesn;t exist. The cognitive equivalent of phlogiston.

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-we might be able to summarize their position on the issue as a gigo moment. Garbage in, garbage out.  If science continues to chase a ghost, then it's consigning itself to peddling a promisory note of future discovery for eternity.  At some point, somebody has to say enough is enough. Why do that, though, if there's no need to do so?