Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

Oooh. . . semantics is fun!  You gonna spin me on the merry-go-round for a while?

Experience is the subjective awareness of qualia.

OR. . . if you wanna get super-precise:  Ya know when you open your eyes in the morning, and you see colors and shapes 'n' stuff?  When you realize "I wasn't aware of the redness of the early-morning sun or the chirping of birds a minute ago, but now I am"?  That's experience.

Well.... if you want to "identify what material systems do or do not experience qualia", then you need to first identify the material systems that coordinate this "I" that you talk about.

Would it make sense to discriminate between hardware and software, in order to facilitate the search of such a system?
Perhaps it's not a material thing, but rather a dynamic collection of things sending signals to each other?

"I" is a label that we use in retrospect, I think.  An object was beheld by a subject, but who is that subject?  Then the linguistics kick in, and you use the first label at hand: I.  "I" in its most essential meaning really is just an acknowledgment of qualia, isn't it?  Every "I" really is the awareness that there's a context drawing unlike properties together: sound with color, for example.

As for hardware and software. . . given the state of QM, it becomes very hard to tell the difference, or to tell which supervenes on which.  Does the hardware "run" the software, or is it just a carrier for contexts that precede it?  Maybe the hardware itself is really another layer of software, Turtles forever, or vice versa.

Okay, so back to systems: I cannot and would not attempt to define systems, for "I" or anything else, because I believe that the truth of these things varies not with anything in them, but in the perspectives and definitions we use to realize them.  If someone wants to take a discrete subsection of the Universe, and say "There is mind here, and this is why. . ." then it is their duty to follow through with a proof.

Short answer: I don't know.  And I'd drop the "materialism" from "eliminativism," because I think the biggest idea we have to let go is the idea that we are in control, that we have real knowledge of reality, or can.  Any philosophical system which attempts a linguistic remedy for the paradoxes or ambiguities all around us is no explanation at all, but rather an expression of fear given a limited understanding in an unlimited context.

This is why I like the idea of truth-in-context. Given X, you can say that Y is true; but given the ambiguities all around us, it's perfectly fair to treat "X" as a perspective rather than as a guess about reality. You can be safe, and also be right, so long as you don't try to conflate every perspective into one context.

--edit--
Sorry if the above is a little schizophrenic. My language breaks down when I really try to comprehend things like this.