Consciousness Trilemma

[Edwardo Piet]

It appears that of the following three propositions only two can be true:

1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.
2) Conscious experience has an essentially subjective character that purely physical processes do not share.
3) The only acceptable explanation of conscious experience is in terms of physical properties alone.

My added coloring.

The blue parts are true and the red parts are false.

Consciousness won't be explained in terms of physical properties... consciousness is physical like everything else... and everything is made of the same stuff... that is both physical and experiential... but most stuff is so simplistic and non-complex that it's effectively, in practice, not conscious at all. (Experientiality/consciousness is on a spectrum... things can be more or less conscious. There is no ultimate on/off switch).


Occam's Razor favors monism over dualism...so it makes sense if everything is ultimately made of the same stuff. That stuff making both the physical and the mental... and since only extremely sophisticated combinations of that stuff allows it to be conscious... it makes more sense to say that everything is ultimately physical than everything is ultimately mental.... in that it is less misleading. But both statements "everything is ultimately physical" and "everything is ultimately mental" are technically ultimately true.

Panpsychism in the sense that Galen Strawson means it must be true.

Very few things are conscious but ultimately consciousness and physicality is all made up of the same stuff.

The main thing is it would be misleading to say that everything is conscious in the sense that we normally mean by conscious.

It's more accurate to say that even the things that we think of as unconscious... are ultimately made up of conscious stuff but their experientiality is so reduced that in practice it's identical to what we call unconsciousness. It's like consciousness on a homeopathic level.

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It appears that of the following three propositions only two can be true:

1) Conscious experience is not an illusion.

In this context, how would you call conscious experience an illusion?  Usually an illusion IS an experience-- of a physical object or property that is not there, or is there in a form radically different than you perceive it.

It's logically impossible for an illusion of consciousness to not itself be conscious.

Indeed... if something seems conscious then the seeming itself is an experience of consciousness.

Something can't ever seem to be conscious without actually being conscious.

From a first person perspective, I mean.

A robot can seem conscious from my perspective but from its own perspective there is no 'seeming' or consciousness at all. I.e. it doesn't have its own perspective.

Something can't seem to be conscious from a first person perspective without there therefore actually being a conscious first person perpsective.

Indeed, an illusion of an experience is an experience itself.

So consciousness cannot possibly be an illusion. Saying that consciousness might be an illusion is as silly as saying that circles might be square.