Someone already recommended Dennett to you. Here’s an article by Dennett in which he expresses skepticism about qualia. It gives an idea of how philosophers can treat the questions of qualia and of consciousness separately.
OK, I need some help here. After reading the first quarter of that article, it is clear I don’t only reject qualia, as Dennet does, but also the “reality of conscious experience” which he endorses in those words. I feel it is unfair to shift the burden of defining “reality of conscious experience” onto me, because the phrase doesn’t have meaning to me. It is clear it is referring to something beyond which I accept, something that I tried to make very clear in my first post: I accept that when we say we are ‘conscious’, that it means only that we are capable of saying such a thing, and nothing more. So let me re-phrase my position to be as absolutely clear as possible:
I believe that humans are capable of using phrases like “the reality of my conscious experience”, or “I am conscious – it is obvious I am experiencing it right now”, but I reject that there is any meaning to what they are trying to describe, beyond demonstrating the ability to refer in some fashion to their own cognitive process. If anyone on this board feels differently, please define what it is that I am rejecting. It seems to me that the burden should be on you to describe what it is you believe in, since I can’t make any sense of any definition of consciousness beyond which I have given above.
In order to be an illusion it would have to be an illusion to me, the person experiencing the illusion. In order for me to experience the illusion I have to be, umm, conscious. If I’m not conscious I’m not having the illusion. I may not be the “me” that I think I am, but whatever the heck I am I am consciously experiencing what I’m experiencing whether it be illusion or other than illusion.
Nope. Not this time. It’s really basic.
What does it mean to be conscious?
Not if by ‘illusion of consciousness’ one means something like:
The language used by an automaton in which it describes itself as “experiencing” some form of reality, when in fact it is merely a vacuous recitation. The word ‘illusion’ is appropriate if the automaton is not aware on the irony of such a recitation. Note that there is no contradiction here: an automaton can be aware in an informational sense of such an irony without having to be “conscious” of it in the “experiential” sense.
I’m trying not to let you bait me here. Your arrogance should already be starting to cause you embarrassment, so I suggest taking a step back.
Ah, but is his arrogance real or just an illusion? How can you be sure?
You’re basically asking us to prove that reality is real, but since any argument we could conceivably present could also be unreal, you’re free to keep rejecting these ideas until we lose interest.
There is a misunderstanding if that is your interpretation of anything I have said here. I don’t even know what you mean by “prove that reality is real.” That doesn’t make any sense to me. In so far as I vaguely understand it, I don’t think people have been offering such proofs, nor have I rejected any. The original point of my OP was simply to see if any here share my philosophical view. A few have come close. A few (like the one I called arrogant) have offered ill-thought out rejections of my premise, which I am compelled to fight, in the name of good thinking.
Yes. If anything whatsoever and whithersoever means anything, it means that something to a consciousness.
I think I should make an important distinction here. My consciousness, and the consciousness of the above-mentioned automaton could be illusions to you. And you would have no way of knowing for certain that they are not illusions.
BUT…
My consciousness can’t be an illusion to me. If it’s an illusion, it’s not an illusion that I can experience. If I can experience it, it isn’t an illusion.
If the automaton can experience itself, and not merely describe itself as experiencing something, it is by definition a conscious automaton. Only the automaton can know for sure that it’s conscious, but if it does, it is.
Maybe your programming is faulty. That’s a perfectly valid explanation, isn’t it, following as it does the concept that the human mind is just a collection of deterministic neurological pathways.
For what it’s worth, I also don’t buy into external spiritual explanations like the soul or whatever, but I figure when a human brain became sufficiently complex that it can self-organize (i.e. it can make decisions on what it will learn), I daresay something beyond determinism (or at least a massively complicated form of determinism) is in play.
Another bold and facile statement. This is not obvious to me, though depends on how you are defining “meaning”. If the universe contained only simple (“unconscious”) computers that could collect, transmit, crypt and decrypt information about their environment and themselves in a logical way, I don’t see how the usual definition of “meaning” doesn’t apply to them and their exchanges and interpretations of information.
A agree with your first sentence here, but the second sentence gets to the crux of where I disagree with you. How do you trust that if the automaton says it is conscious, that it really is? You seem to agree that you can’t know for sure. “only the automaton knows for sure.” So then the tricky part is applying the same doubt to yourself. We can agree to disagree, perhaps, but I think you are too hasty if you dismiss out of hand the notion that you can’t trust your own continual self-recitation that you yourself are conscious. My opinion is that it’s like a mantra that you’ve been trained extremely deeply to repeat internally, so that it becomes “obvious” that “I know I am conscious”, when in fact you are merely saying so. Perhaps you reject this possibility as out of hand because of the qualia that you experience. Well that too is not outside of criticism.
Oh OK, so now you’re just giving me a hard time 
Maybe my programming is faulty, but I still can’t quite parse your vague “proving reality is real”.
Well sure, I agree with you there.
To be conscious, then, is to be a consumer of signs? Does that sound fair?
The concept of “illusion” presupposes the concept of “consciousness.” Every definition of the word “illusion” contrasts it with its opposite, that is, the perception of that which is objectively real. If there is no objective reality and nothing conscious of it, then the word “illusion” has no meaning. Even an illusion (or a lie or a mirage or an hallucination) requires consciousness to exist. Someone has to experience the illusion . . . or it’s not an illusion.
( . . . which does raise an interesting question: If a mirage occurs in a desert, with nobody to see it, is it still a mirage?)
Well yes. That is exactly what is happening (although you could lose the “nothing more than”).
Consciousness and choices are a result of deterministic physical processes which have organized in such a way as to result in consciousness and choices.
I think what you are doing is defining yourself out of existence. You have to let yourself be the deterministic physical processes that make you up. Once that is what you are, you can see that the being you are is conscious. You are aware of your existence, you are aware of certain thoughts, you are aware of certain stimuli. Yes, all of that is deterministic… but it is still you.
I believe that sufficiently advanced science (perhaps beyond human limits) could better explain this phenomenon. It is already possible for us to “point” at some aspects of consciousness. We can differentiate between conscious choices and involuntary reflexes. If science ever did advance far enough to explain this, maybe it would come out that we were no more conscious than certain animals or computers. I don’t know, though I have my suspicions. But since I don’t maintain the impossibility of animals or computers being conscious, this presents no problem.
Given that I don’t find the word ‘consciousness’ to have meaning, it should not be surprising that I find ‘illusion’ with regard to a conscious experience likewise without meaning. That in no way prevents me from using a phrase like ‘illusion of consciousness’ to refer to the fact that consciousness doesn’t exist, and that those who claim to have it are unaware of the irony inherent in their claims. (see my other posts defining the term). It seems to me that you are trying to pic apart my semantics for no good reason – what point, specifically, are you making?
I contend that I am not aware of my existence in any sense other than that I contain information (as a computer would) referring to my physical and mental state and experiences, which I can report on. Some of that information may be correct, some of it incorrect, some of it incoherent. But in any case that information and the retrieval of it alone does not constitute consciousness, unless you also want to call some rather primitive computer AI conscious.
It is questionable whether we really have consciousness and what it is. But I don’t lose over it.
Sleep. Don’t lose sleep over it.