Your domino reference suggests you continue to confuse free will with consciousness.
Free will is the idea that out minds might somehow have a self-generated non-deterministic ability to make decisions that is unmoored or constrained from causes that others can see or investigate.
This is either trivially not true (as in the "many worlds" deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics), or trivially true in a weak sense (quantum mechanics non-deterministic interpretation) i.e. our decisions are controlled by quantum randomness, but not by any special property of our minds.
There is zero evidence of "free will" and yet people have conjectured they might have it for as long as we have records of people's introspection. This phenomenon is easy to understand: it is a typical example of motivated reasoning. We have a biological imperative to desire freedom of action and though. "Free will" is the ultimate fantasy of freedom of thought. So regardless of all lack of evidence, people will be drawn to, and depending on rationality, adopt a strong belief, in their "free will".
So we can dispense with that self-motivated "illusion" based on good science.
In that sense, there is an illusion as you say.
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That leaves your point (if this rephrasing of your point is acceptable to you) that self-awareness in a functional sense does not necessarily imply an entity has the qualia of self-awareness, i.e. consciousness.
I also agree with that. Somewhere between us and a deck of cards saying things like "I am conscious" is a mechanism we could build that had some level of self-referential ability, could say things to you or me that looked like consciousness to us, but which didn't really understand itself. And therefore could not actually be conscious.
We can agree that their can be an illusion of consciousness. But note the illusion is to external observers. The limited entity itself has no subjective awareness of the illusion or anything else.
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Which is why consciousness cannot be an illusion to an entity that experiences it. It is one of the very few (the only?) completely direct experience we have, with no intermediary.
If you have the qualia of self-awareness, then you have it. There is no illusion of having it. If you don't have consciousness, you cannot experience the qualia of an illusion of consciousness.
I appreciate you writing all that for me. I'm now uncertain where I fall with my position. I don't really think I'm aware because everything is predetermined and even if randomness is thrown into the equation it doesn't matter. I know you think I'm mixing free will with consciousness but I just think a person cannot be aware if they're always going to process a certain way because of the starting point of the universe. It just seems like I'm a sim in a video game. Where everything is completely programmed out for whatever to happen and I cannot say that either a character in a video game or I, would be resembling what consciousness means for me. In any case I'm undecided now.
Free will is the idea that out minds might somehow have a self-generated non-deterministic ability to make decisions that is unmoored or constrained from causes that others can see or investigate.
This is either trivially not true (as in the "many worlds" deterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics), or trivially true in a weak sense (quantum mechanics non-deterministic interpretation) i.e. our decisions are controlled by quantum randomness, but not by any special property of our minds.
There is zero evidence of "free will" and yet people have conjectured they might have it for as long as we have records of people's introspection. This phenomenon is easy to understand: it is a typical example of motivated reasoning. We have a biological imperative to desire freedom of action and though. "Free will" is the ultimate fantasy of freedom of thought. So regardless of all lack of evidence, people will be drawn to, and depending on rationality, adopt a strong belief, in their "free will".
So we can dispense with that self-motivated "illusion" based on good science.
In that sense, there is an illusion as you say.
---
That leaves your point (if this rephrasing of your point is acceptable to you) that self-awareness in a functional sense does not necessarily imply an entity has the qualia of self-awareness, i.e. consciousness.
I also agree with that. Somewhere between us and a deck of cards saying things like "I am conscious" is a mechanism we could build that had some level of self-referential ability, could say things to you or me that looked like consciousness to us, but which didn't really understand itself. And therefore could not actually be conscious.
We can agree that their can be an illusion of consciousness. But note the illusion is to external observers. The limited entity itself has no subjective awareness of the illusion or anything else.
---
Which is why consciousness cannot be an illusion to an entity that experiences it. It is one of the very few (the only?) completely direct experience we have, with no intermediary.
If you have the qualia of self-awareness, then you have it. There is no illusion of having it. If you don't have consciousness, you cannot experience the qualia of an illusion of consciousness.