Consciousness Trilemma

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

How sure are you that what you call discrete things aren't really so only by concept?

As sure as you are.  This one's a sinking ship Benny.  It doesn't matter.  If there are discrete systems, do we possess such a system as described by our conscious experience?  If there are not, then qed, eliminitivism is true by default. 

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

Ah but they are.  The table -is- literally solid to a creature of your size and composition.  It;s not just tables, either, a great many things you experience as "solid" would not seem that way to other creatures. The ground beneath your feet, for example.  

We already -know- where the mental states this maps to reside, and how it is possible for them to do and be so. Area s2 of the somatosensory processes inputs from your fingertips, for example, when mechanoreceptors in your dermis send a signal to that area - which they are hard wired into.  Your fingertips are mechanical pressure plates, area s2 is the light bulb that turns on when something hits them. We can watch the whole thing happen in realtime and so it's not quite as difficult to account for as the "qualia" referenced in the same example.  You feel it, but we can see the stuff that makes all of thi happen...we just can;t seem to find the you that's feeling.  The somatosensory, for example, does not then send that processing to any central place. So....the solidity of the table as represented by the nervous system isn't even remotely illusory in the manner that eliminative materialists might consider self or qualia to be illusory. I can't walk through a wall. Why I can't walk through that wall and why my material system presents this data to me is almost unremarkable. That I "feel" the pressure, well...a little more remarkable..wouldn't you say -particularly in that my material system does not appear to be presenting this data to any "I" in the first place- . ?

You know, this whole solidity business is a great example of what soprts of things eliminitive materialists might apply their trade. We had some folk beliefs concerning solidity. Turns out they were wrong. Solidity does not mean, after all..that there is no space between atoms...simply that there isn;t enough space for -us- to fit between those atoms. If we attempted an explanation of solidity that relied on there being no space, rather than no space for us, we would fail..agreed? The explanation would be necessarily inaccurate. Our beliefs regarding mind, in their opinion, are just another example of those same sorts of folk stories. Jut as compelleing as the idea that there was no space between atoms, and largely for the same reasons...but, ultimately, innaccurate.