Consciousness Trilemma

[pocaracas]

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.

yeah, it's because I too feel the language breaking down that I tried to get clarification on "I" and "to experience".
Those terms are fine for colloquial speech, but, when we get to the level we got here, they need some refinement... a refinement which I am unaware exists or is even possible.

We do know that most of our thought process resides in the brain. Where exactly in that mess of billions of neurons? possibly everywhere and nowhere in particular.

The software distinction I mentioned comes about because of our inability to restart a dead brain. A dead brain probably retains all the neuron connections... it's just the signal patterns that have stopped (or so it seems).
Sure, the signals follow neural pathways that mostly get built up during childhood, strengthened during the teens years and then tweaked during adulthood... and each person has their own pov, so each person gets their own neural pathways, ever so slightly different from everyone else's... and that's enough to account for all of our different minds.
And then, on top of that, you still get the signal patterns, the software.

Or maybe not. maybe those signals are just what arises from neurons doing their mostly predetermined job. I don't buy the QM uncertainty at the level of cells.... they're too big for QM to have a non-negligible effect.