Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

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

This whole concept is still throwing me. How can an experience be anything but a bona fide experience? It is not intrinsically attached to any truth value or rightness or wrongness.

[quote]

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.

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.  

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.  

Yeah, that's the right word for it. I'm beginning to get an actual glimmer of interest in this thread, because while the particular views might not be my own, I like that people are really stretching for new views on this stuff. Not only that, it's interesting to see how much of the new ideas discussed in context of material monist philosophy closely mirror things I've read from Hindu or Buddhist philosophy-- maybe those guys actually had brains, and weren't just woo-tards after all, eh?

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.

If consciousness isn't a property or a function of material systems, then what the heck do they think it is?

 
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.

This sounds suspiciously like what I've sometimes said about the science of mind-- if you can't identify it directly, or show what systems do/don't experience qualia, then stop saying you're doing science of the mind, and call it neurology.

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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?

I'm going to have to take a break from this thread and find some good sources on this. My interest is piqued enough to track down some seriously literature on it.