Good read on consciousness

[The Grand Nudger]

You seem to be talking about access consciousness, and thereby treating consciousness as something that does not involve qualia.

So let me try again. How can you demonstrate that what you call "illusion" (this pseudo-phenomenal thingy) is something that is experienced by other beings, human or not?

Sure, I've discussed access consciousness a few times.  It may be possible to dissociate the two, they might..in fact..be the same thing, and they might be different but always correlated.  

At any rate, if illusionism is true, conscious -is- something that doesn't involve qualia.  

More importantly, how does the brain conjure up that what you call "illusion"?

In the manner that I think you've been asking - it very literally doesn't.  It doesn't do anything like the thing we report.

Whatever other beings may or may not possess, from a first-person-perspective, some beings can know they have their own [phenomenal] consciousness because that is exactly what they are experiencing. It's not a matter of making false attributions here; if you directly experience, then your experience is real and any report about this experience by revealing this experience is accurate, no matter if the report is nevertheless not an accurate report of what's really happening physically in the CNS or in the world "out there".

In illusionism, the assertion of phenomenological experience is, itself, a false attribution. We're asserting that we possess something that we do not. The assertion is a claim - not it's demonstration.

This is ridiculous. One's own consciousness (or at least in my case) isn't something I'm just simply asserting. It's what I'm directly experiencing, it's this first-person-perspective that I'm experiencing that I'm absolutely certain that I have, regardless of what its nature may be and regardless of what "I" exactly is. This is nothing like forcing god into the equation. It's something one should reasonably accept by default, not accept that it's not really real.

If a substance dualist demanded that his position be default because he just knew that consciousness was a different kind of stuff, how would you respond?

You're fucking with me, lol. "I" am the person who possesses this perspective. There's no person "in there", it's "me" who is experiencing it.

And speaking of seeing stuff, I can vividly right now see the words I'm typing on screen. How does this vividness come about? I've yet to see anyone have a satisfactory answer to questions like this.

I'm not fucking with you at all.  It makes sense, it's a very simple idea, and it has observational data and experimental support behind it.  It may be wrong, but there's nothing obviously wrong with the idea.

Huh? I don't know how to answer such a question. If it somehow did make sense and is possible, then it can be true. But would I believe it true, I don't know.

AST predicts that you would be absolutely incapable of acting as though you believed it.  Even if you knew better, knew it, you would proceed exactly as you do now.  We don't have another option.

None of that changes my position that this doesn't make sense. I don't know what it is that illusionists do exactly when arguing their position, but it comes off to me as if they don't like the idea of something that appears to be "non-physical" be real, so they've come up with this extreme reductionist view called illusionism that they can be satisfied with. If it's not physical, it's not real, let's scratch that away and say well, we're just confused about it, that's why we think it's real, but it's not! Problem solved!

Or maybe they really are p-zombies and genuinely don't possess [phenomenal] consciousness, so they think this must be the case with everyone else as well. Half-joking here, but you never know ...  

It's not about what appears to be non physical.  It's about what appears to be non present and non necessary to explain the reports.  Presumably, a pixie dust brain could be built out of non physical stuff but if it didn't have a pixie dust man in there somewhere pixiedust experiencing then the pixie-dustists might come to a pixie dust version of illusionism.  

I'm the "you" (or, rather, "me") you're looking for, but the problem is you can't experience "me", so I can't provide you with "me". But just because you can't see "me" doesn't mean therefore, there is no "me" that experiences.

Not with respect to illusionism.  You would be replaced by organism or machine, as there's nothing of a real person™ in there really feeling what it's like to be.  If you can't demonstrate yourself, I can't find you, and I don't need you to explain you...then, at some point, you really do have to start wondering just how effective you are, if you do exist.  

How can one get to the point of being able to find "a few reports of phenomenological experience that we have reason to believe the organism would be incapable of genuinely reporting"? Having a hard time following the line of thinking behind questions like this. If the organism is incapable of reporting some type of experience, then it wouldn't be able to do so, and any reports (physical?) that you find of such a contradiction would have be to false (if I'm getting your question right).

Can organisms genuinely report experiences they do not, or cannot, have?  Would you take a human report of bat qualia credibly? A substance dualist might say no because you need a bat soul for that - you don't find a bat soul in there.  A physical realist or emergentist would say no because you need the a- consciousness of a bat or equivalent bat structures - and you're stuck to human a con and human structures.

An illusionist thinks that we can and do genuinely report experiences that we do not and cannot have because we can't find the contents of the report or it's attendant structure in our brains, nor are either required to explain how our brains work, or to explain how the reports are generated.  All we have is the word of human beings, who can be genuinely convinced of any number of untrue things, even genuinely convinced that they have had an experience they most assuredly have not. If we're capable of producing false reports of conscious experience, might conscious experience also be a false report?

Should be able to do "brain stuff" including the qualia we believe we experience, what illusionists call "illusion"?

If that's what brain is doing, sure.  It's the skinned cat theory of consciousness.  However we arrive at it, our way probably isn't the only way, and whatever ours is built from probably isn't the only thing it can be built from.  You can make a broadhead arrow out of alot of things..but jello won't work.  For all of the broadhead arrows there may be out there in the world, i expect to find plenty of jello too.

The view that you're expressing seems more like emergentism, btw,  panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind or mind-alike.  If certain arrangements of matter or something about the arrangement of the brain gives rise to mind - then mind is emergent, not ubiquitous. A camera has a perspective, but no mind. Perspective itself (in humans) is a consciousness, not p consciousness. We don't think that a camera has a p experience of it's perspective, we do believe that we do. Who knows, though, right? Imagine how fucked up some cameras minds could be by now, with a conscious experience of their perspective - which is wholly under some terrible corpse fetish species control. War reporters iphones crying themselves to sleep at night wishing they got pointed at cupcakes instead.

I got a giggle from the wife -panpsychism is the view that consciousness is real and everywhere, and illusionism the view that consciousness everywhere is unreal.