Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

It's obvious that I've failed to explain eliminativism, since you think it might be further elimitivism to insist that there are no discrete systems in the universe.  I'm not the engine in my car.  We are discrete systems.  That would be true regardless of what either I or my car were made of.

This is a good example of a view that is commonly held, but actually doesn't hold up to scrutiny, methinks. The "driving" system includes both you and the car, and the combustion system involves both you and the car as well as the environment; the propulsion involves the road and so on. Then there's a connection by gravity. There's also your connection, through DNA, to events stretching back for billions of years, interacting in perhaps complex ways with the organisms whose corpses are now in your gas tank. How sure are you that what you call discrete things aren't really so only by concept? On what basis do you take the common view that "I'm an object, the car is an object, and I'm driving the car," while expecting that other equally pragmatic understandings of how we work in the world be suspended or discarded?

And how about QM? Are you ready to give up on "illusory" concepts like "solid" and "flat" and "red," and to discard them as meaningless for that reason? Surely, they aren't represented in a literal description of material reality as we understand it today.