The Necker Cube of Phenomenal Consciousness

I was a teenage illusionist, then I realized my confusion

For many years (from mid-2020 to mid-2024 or so?), I held an illusionist view of consciousness that could be summarized by the following.

Although I was pretty inside-view-convinced of this perspective, I still (as far as I remember) felt some kind of tension with my … well, ironically, lived internal/phenomenal experience. But any way to verbalize/articulate this tension was doomed to fall flat because the foundation of the illusionist frame is that it doesn't consider claims of having internal/phenomenal experience valid evidence.

Obviously, illusionism doesn't entirely dissolve the supposed mystery — the "hard problem" of consciousness: "How does phenomenal consciousness arise in the first place?". It replaces it with a different problem — the meta-problem of consciousness — which is, quoting Chalmers:

So I was still trying to think of solutions to it. I put a dump of my thoughts on the topic at the end of this post.

I only started to seriously and explicitly question this view upon reading Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature. Not that the book presented any convincing object-level argument against illusionism.² As I just said, any such argument would have fallen flat, dismissed by my illusionist conviction.

Incomplete Nature did something else instead. It had a recurring theme that was something like "People tend to deny stuff that is (or should be) obvious to them because they can't make sense of it in the limited framework that they've adopted.", of which two examples that I found appealing were behaviorist psychology (denial of mind, thought, &c.) and denial of any notion of purpose in biology. But also illusionism and various forms of elliminativism, including consciousness eliminativism.³

Initially, I thought Deacon was wrong about my kind of illlusionism. But it gave me food for thought. Something finally put a small crack in my firm illusionism and led me down the route of thinking in a more open-minded way.⁴ I started re-examining my "inner experience" without rejecting it just because I couldn't make any sense of it within my current framework. I let myself treat it as a butterfly idea, still too immature and in a phase of early exploration/growth to be subjected to intense scrutiny. Perhaps in combination with the question of the core of mindness, this made me think that I might have been privileging the objectively defensible/legibilizable kind of information over more private kind of information, even though (from my subjective perspective) the former always necessarily routes through the latter.⁵⁶

This drastically decreased my credence in illusionism, perhaps from ~95% to ~25%⁷ but the other 75% was basically "I don't know, something weird is going on." which left me with a rather unstable view about phenomenal consciousness. It felt like my perspective was flickering like a Necker cube between (1) illusionism, (2) phenomenal-experience-first-ism, (3) some superposition of the two which I judged to be probably the closest to the truth but also hard to make sense of.

After about half a year, a sketch of a solution dawned on me in some equivalent of a shower thought.

A no bullshit dualistic theory of consciousness?

Here is a speculative metaphysical possibility that has recently⁸ occured to me as a straightforward implication of my thoughts on consciousness at the time and an extrapolation of the direction in which my views had been moving for about half a year before that.

It's still unsatisfyingly messy but I intend to construct a generalized and more clearly presented version soon.

There are two stances/standpoints that a consciousness-capable mind can take towards itself (or perhaps its capacity for consciousness). There's the internal perspective of a conscious/situated observer where the observed and observed are the same thing (as much as this is possible) and the mind is trying to make sense of itself using its internal-referencing elements. And then there's the external perspective in which the mind is trying to make sense of itself using its external-referencing elements.⁹

We have these two distinct perspectives because we have mostly distinct sets of internally-referencing elements and externally-referencing elements.

The mind is trying to understand itself which causes representation-like elements of mind-as-subject-of-understanding and mind-as-object-of-understanding to emerge.

When taking the internal perspective, the mind is using its internally-referencing elements to understand itself. This causes a blur in the distinction between the subject and the object of understanding. Nothing else can be understood in this way (except other consciousness-capable minds, given some extrapolatory assumtions; more on that later) and therefore this gives the mind-as-object a special place in the mind-as-subject's ontos. Since the mind-as-object is understood (by mind-as-subject) to be capable of understanding everything else, this prompts the mind-as-subject to see mind-as-object as a "locus of being", a "center of reality". It is also seen as "basic" and "irreducible" because it is what enables understanding everything else.

When taking the external perspective, the mind is using its externally-referencing elements to understand itself. This makes it see itself as "just another thing in the world" among many other things in the world, without a privileged position in its ontos.

The external perspective has the potential explain the mechanism implementing the internal perspective (given enough knowledge of how the brain/mind works) whereas the internal perspective doesn't have the potential to explain the external perspective.¹⁰ However, an explanation of its mechanism is not the explanation of its phenomenology because its phenomenology can only be made sense of from inside the internal perspective.

The internal perspective cannot be fully understood by the external perspective because the internal perspective relies on internally referencing elements which make sense only from the internal perspective that is using them. The external perspective doesn't have such elements. Therefore, although the external perspective can explain the mechanism of the internal perspective, it cannot understand/accommodate the internal perspective whereas the internal perspective can understand/accommodate the external perspective.

The following image seems to emerge:

• Consciousness-capable minds emerge out of "mere matter" but those minds' consciousness and subjectivity can't be made sense of except from the internal perspective of the consciousness-capable mind itself (or some other consciousness-capable mind that can attempt to understand that mind via something like gemini modeling).
• A mind being conscious is (or can be?) "a fact of the matter"-like only from the internal perspective of the mind itself.
• Since the internal perspective is not translatable into the external perspective, there is no "objective fact of the matter" whether any given mind is conscious (consciousness-capable) or not.
• Consciousness is thus underdetermined. A cognitive system X has some freedom in deciding whether some other cognitive system Y is conscious.
  • This is not an "anything goes" freecard. Obviously rocks and pens are not conscious. Obviously other humans (in their normal state of functioning) are conscious, at least insofar we are interested in using the concept of consciousness (unlike former me, for example). Ditto chimps, dogs, crows. Perhaps we start running into edge cases around, IDK, fish or insects.
• Whether an entity is granted the consciousness certificate depends on factors such as:
  • 1. Pragmatic usefulness of doing so (contractualism's tendrils reach everywhere, for better or worse).
  • 2. Substrate similarity (e.g. relevantly similar brain architecture).
  • 3. Functional/computational similarity (e.g. relevantly similar patterns of computation, information processing, thinking, whatever).
  • 4. … and probably more …

But/and now I think that this might be the appropriate way to think about many other issues, such as abstraction, metaphysics, emergence, supervenience, and a bunch of things that often turn out to be lumped together in discussions of consciousness, such as experience, suffering, valence, and moral standing. But I'm postponing that discussion to a differen post because this one has gotten pretty long already.

Conditional on illusionism being true, why do we think that there is a problem of consciousness?

Here are some possibilities:

1. Meta-perception. What we call "qualia" are our perceptions of our own percepts. These meta-percepts can't be described in terms of real-world-directed legible descriptions (other than quasi-tautological reference to that percept's objects are) and therefore appear mysterious and ineffable. (That one is my favorite illusionist explanation of consciousness and I came up with it on my own though probably Frankish or whoever are also familiar with something like it.)
2. … (I think I had more ideas to list here but now don't remember but I'll add more if something comes up.)