Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

Sure it is, it's intrinsically attached the truth value of an "experience",  of an "I" -to- experience, the truth value of any dependencies of that experience, or of that I, or of whatever it is you're describing...intrinsically attached, just like everything else, to the truth value of those propositions it assumes.

What if it's a self-alike organizing system..in that how I report and describe my "experience" is little more than a collection of ways that I've heard it described before that fit propositions to which I already have access?  The brain expects and so reports a self that experiences because this is one of the cultural/linguistic inputs which it was fed....and machines assume the truth of their inputs as a matter of course.  "I was conscious at/of moment x", rather than actually -being- conscious of or at moment x.  

What if some or all of how it seems to be is merely the narrative context for a record of behavior that's been created, but not necessarily a record of any genuine experience or self?

Even experience, itself, is impeachable. It can't be treated as a brute fact that certifies it's own accuracy.  This is one of the things that makes subjective agency less than useful in a scientific explanation of consciousness.  It's not objective(lol), it's commonly in error, and it might not even exist, at the very least not in the way that people commonly envision and experience it. It can;t exist in that way, unless theres some mysterious and unknown element x - another proposition not available to eliminative materialists, or any materialist.

 

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?

Nah, wootards.  Unfortunately, that's another thing that brains cant do; keep us from being woo-tards.  

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

Not really what they're saying.  They're saying that some descriptions of consciousness do not or cannot map to a discrete mental state.  Many still think that whatever is presenting itself as-such is a property or function of material systems...it's just not the property or function it self reports as.  This is why dennet, for example, makes comments to the effect of "consciousness doesn't exist"  -and- "ofc consciousness exists, it's just not what you think it is".  The designation all hinges on what someone -else- insists is consciousness.  Those that would, though, take the hardest reduction - would tell you that they don't believe that it -is-, in the first place.

It;s very important to acknowledge a distinction between consciousness as it reports itself or consciousness described as x, and consciousness as it actually is, if it is....because otherwise, the tendency is towards straw.  Not, imo, because a person is trying to pitch straw, but because eliminative materialism is counter-intuitive-.  Particularly in that what eliminative materialism takes aim at...are our intuitive notions of consciousness in the first place.  

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.

Well, they probably couldn't throw in the end of that, about nuerology, nor would they have to insist on the actual existence of qualia as described by some position x. But yeah..something like that.  

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.

Enjoy it bigly. Here's a fun one to mull over while you do. Is there a consciousness that tells a story about behavior; or is there a behavior that tells a story about consciousness?