I see, so in this case we're defining awareness as something like, "being conscious of the external world." That seems a perfectly reasonable definition to take, even if it's not necessarily my first choice (although I should have seen it as an obvious candidate).
But I'm afraid that I'm still a bit lost on one point: given that we both agree that it defies coherence for conscious experience itself to be illusory, in what other sense could consciousness be an "illusion"? You mention that consciousness is sometimes "marginalized" or viewed as "a byproduct," but these seem like vague straw men to me. Marginalized in what way? Marginalized as in not given the empirical examination that you think it deserves, or marginalized in some other way? And what exactly do you mean by byproduct? If you mean a causal byproduct--as in asserting that consciousness is an epiphenomenon--isn't this just implicitly bringing free will back into the discussion? And if we take it in anything other than causal terms, the claim that consciousness is a "byproduct" seems self-evident; physical systems potentially give rise to consciousness, but it's rather difficult to entertain the idea that consciousness gives rise to physical systems. What is consciousness a byproduct of, and in what way?
I see your point about where to draw the line when it comes to which entities have conscious experience, but I actually don't think you take it far enough. While the idea is certainly nothing like universally accepted, in relative terms it seems rather uncontroversial to view non-human animals--even non-human organisms more generally, outside the kingdom Animalia--as having some form of consciousness, however primitive. Indeed, I would say that on an implicit level at least, everyone believes this to a certain extent. A good illustration of this point that I recently heard was that of giving dogs anesthesia when performing medical operations on them. If we really, truly believed that dogs did not have consciousness, why on earth would we bother to minimize their suffering?
Where things really get interesting is when we consider the possibility of consciousness outside of living organisms. The famous example given by Chalmers is that of a thermostat. Does a thermostat have some form of consciousness? Why not? What is it missing that we have? And whatever those missing things are, why should it be those things that give rise to conscious experience? There are simply no satisfying answers to these questions. (The full argument is considerably more involved than this--it's explicated in the paper linked above--but this is a fair portrayal of at least a portion of it.)
As I wrote earlier, I take Chalmers's argument very seriously. Too many people are reflexively put off by the "dualist" label which he self applies, and they tend to engage in a motivated search for minimally sufficient reasons to discount the argument rather than giving it the full consideration that it deserves. I agree with Chalmers's assessment that his position is "an innocent version" of dualism, and would even assert that while the label he chose is probably the most fitting in the strictest sense, he might have gotten away with labeling it as a variant of monism. Indeed, given our current state of scientific knowledge, physicalism (a.k.a., materialism) is only a form of monism as a matter of faith. Our current, most basic physical knowledge divides reality into four distinct, irreducible "fundamental forces" (gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces) which are not inherently different from Descartes's mind- and body-substances. Ironically, this leaves physicalism twice as pluralistic as dualism! The only real justification that we have to label the current view of physicalism as a form of monism is that we believe that there is an underlying "substance" (often called a "unifying theory") which constitutes and explains all of the four fundamental forces, but that we simply haven't discovered it yet. What Chalmers essentially proposes is that we add a fifth fundamental force: conscious experience. The only way that this qualifies his position as a form of dualism at all is if we allow that physicalism will eventually discover a unifying, monist "substance" (unifying theory). Otherwise, all it's doing is making the dominant form of pluralism a bit more pluralist. And anyway, it seems plausible that this unifying substance would also include conscious experience within its explanatory reach. In that case, endorsing Chalmers's position would be no more dualist than acknowledging the existence of gravity!
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