Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

Our capacity for moral feelings, and their resulting behaviors, are real enough, are they not?  If you have a theory of mind to which morality is irrelevant, but the reality is that it IS relevant, then your theory of mind is incorrect or incomplete.

They're no more or less what they are, regardless of how they are arrived at.  Saying that a theory of mind is incorrect or incomplete because you believe it rubs up against a negatively valued consequence of some moral system you have in your mind?

What sense does that make?

First of all, so far as I can tell, eliminativism isn't a theory of mind.  It's a theory of nope-not-that.  You can say, for example, that morality, free will, and a sense of self are illusory because it doesn't "map" to any locatable physical system, process or property.  What you can't say is what it is like to experience moral ideas and feelings, and why that should matter.

The sense of it is that we are clearly highly social animals, and that our social behaviors are mediated by emotions, experiences and ideas.  Claiming that this-or-that feeling is illusory leaves a void-- you have to explain why we DO behave certain ways, and hopefully be able to establish some sense of how we SHOULD behave.

I can pretty simply explain moral ideas in subjective terms-- mothers feel great pain at the idea of harm coming to their offspring, and so they will struggle very hard to avoid that happening.  Where does eliminativism stand on ANY description of any part of humanity except nitpicking about what consciousness-is-not, what love-is-not, what self-is-not and so on?