You might say it's an hour's worth of sincere writing expressing a decade's worth of sincere thinking

You might go on to say that despite whatever virtues it has, it still sucks & it's bad medicine, but hey

Occupational hazard

It's a good wall of text I put some decent thought into it

@lucresnooker.bsky.social is a green owl. And he's, "on the cosmic microwave backline"

That's the state of play. She is how she is folks

Yeah, of course

It's actually impossible to get closer to a plain statement of numinous truth (& rendered with absolutely haunting concision, too) than what you said there

I think you've got the heart of it, yes

I do have things to say about what the structure of the 60% is such that the 40% can seem very puzzling, and I've tried to say those things in the thread below to the fine invert, but you have understood the core shape of argument

Jeeze I really wall of texted you, but what can I say? It takes a lot of saying to get this stuff out there. I hope I've done a good job & it's received in the intended spirit by a fellow traveller

Thanking you & all fine readers for you time

The scene is illuminated for the subject who finds the illumimation therein

There isn't a need for a further "meta illumimation" to light the thing up again

And this is where its a mistake, the one I'm calling "the fallacy of the vehicle", to think that this scene needs to have something further done to it to make the qualia the subject sees "really light up"

And *you* aren't really that subject. You're the whole patterned scene (& the rest of the body that hosts it)

But the "magic" is in the scene as a feature of its structure, it consists in the way the subject is related to the other things that arise alongside it

But the scene taken as a whole doesn't need this kind of illumimation (and it cannot be supplied). The qualia are embedded in the real structure of the scene, a mysterious magic encountered by the subject as part of the scene in which they arise

Within this scene, there is no mistake in saying that objects are numinously available to the subject, that the subject can report, "but look, I see it, i am phenomenally aware of it, it has qualitative features that consist in displaying certain qualia for me"

This is in fact exactly what we expect objects to be like for the subject, because of the structure of the clearing and the nature of figure & ground

Yes, the objects in the scene exhibit traits that resist capture as a self-contained figure. There is "just something to them" that overspills any attempt attention makes to grasp them, which includes the "illuminated" way they show up, & the way their features are not all available to name

Yes, all of the objects in the scene are always already in thorough contact with the subject, available to be seen, already being seen

Basically:

I don't think you need to bite the bullet that you're biting. Consciousness can be preserved in all the ways it presents itself to you. You put it as "the presence of qualia" & while that's tricky vocabulary here (long story...) I think it's fine & the intuition is fine

"The objects without their arrangement", if you could have such a thing, would just be an unordered list. It wouldn't be a functional design for a mind, and "the arrangement" isn't something you can remove from a structured scene without destroying the scene

But if on the contrary phenomenality is a result of the way the objects and subjects are arranged in the scene, then it can no longer be subtracted in the same way

Notice that this makes pzombies incoherent. If we think phenonemality is an extra property belonging to the subjects and objects, then of course we can imagine manipulating those objects minus the phenomenality.

But the way these contents are arranged with respect to each other and connect into a meaningful scene is in a broad sense "cognitive content". And the fact that the scene has this structure is the aspect that stands outside of the individual objects that accounts for their illumination

It might be helpful to think about the difference between the contents (with an "s"), which are the individual objects that the clearing let's be. Consciousness is not among these contents

And I don't think you're wrong to say in a broad sense that what I'm describing is a type of cognitive content. Yes, it is part of the objectively real structure of the brain. But it's a very tricky thing to say that can very easily mislead you if you don't have the cube-flip in view

It is a name for being "clearingly situated", if you will; naming the way the subject is always in intimate contact with the other objects that presence themselves

It absolutely *is* a category error to treat consciousness as a "thing among the other things"

You are completely correct to sense that there is a categorical distinctness to consciousness, you're completely right that it isn't any one of the figures, and it isn't in the subject

You could say that the clearing is like a "transcendental criterion"; aka, it's the condition for anything to show up at all. Remember the figure / ground story: Whatever shows up does so as figure on ground, attempts to see the ground only ever turn it into a figure against a different ground

Basically, there's this primordial situation where the subject & objects come into being together in the clearing

This change in perspective (to orient you & any other readers) is the same perspective I was trying to explain and motivate when I described the clearing that lets be the subject & the objects. When I learned this perspective, it shaped me a lot! Describing it is more important to me than winning

Of course you don't need to see this for your line to run into trouble. I could press on the "magic", but you see it's magic too, & holy crap is it a relief not to play out that sideline... But, yeah, we can't actually have magic

So, how to avoid the magical conclusion?

A change in perspective

But it's important to get clear *exactly here.* This is one of the Key Moves, & really seeing it is like "flipping a necker cube" — when you see it, you won't understand all the secrets of the universe, but you *will* have a new vantage that dissolves this difficulty

First of all, for the agreement:

Yes, I agree that consciousness is, if it's anything, what causes you to say you're conscious. I also agree that it is categorically distinct from the physical objects you see