Consciousness Trilemma

[bennyboy]

Which has been explained to you, explicitly, more than once or twice or even three times.  I'll explain it again.  Eliminitive materialists contend that some or many of the mental states that most people believe in (including scientists and philosophers of mind) will not or cannot map to a discrete neural state.  That they have not, yet, goes without saying...if they did, we'd already have a solid explanation of mind.  

In that way, those mental states are illusory. The state of the table as "solid" -does- map to something objectively verifiable and fully within the confines of both what we consider to be solid objects and the underlying material paradigm that explains them.  The fact that, regardless of the space between atoms, there's isn't enough space for -us- to pass between them.  

You've already been made aware of an eliminitivist theory of mind, multiple drafts...to which you had little to no objection.  You're now asking this question as though you hadn't already been made aware, hadn't already discussed it.

It's fairly easy to say what things aren't.  Mind isn't a barrel of blue cheese or a Magic Space Monkey, for example.  But what is it?  What do they think it is, and how would they determine whether a given physical subsystem has it?

You have often done this before-- said that you've explained things over and over and it's not my fault if you get it.  But I'm not really that dumb a guy, and my memory's not really that bad.  If you had proposed a theory of mind detailed enough to take seriously, I believe I would have noticed it.  I even stopped for a day to go read the wikipedia page, and was left with the same questions I'm having now-- which are the exact questions that a theory of mind must be prepared to answer:

1)  Do you believe there's mind?
2)  If no, fuck off, because "mind" is a label, at least in part, for the experience of qualia, and whatever they are, they are in fact being experienced when I wake up in the morning.
3)  If yes, then what do you say mind is, how do you know it is this, and by what criteria do I establish whether a given physical system has/is it?

Anything which doesn't arrive at (3), with a sensible explanation of a material mechanism, cannot be called a material theory of mind.