Hi Brent

Re: You said (or you quoted someone as saying): "every adequate account of what we mean by 'consciousness' would be trivial/circular/uninformative."

I was quoting someone, as I recall. It’s not my view (and anyway it seems self -contradictory: if the account was “adequate” how could it be trivial/circular/uninformative”?). Every account I’ve seen in the philosophy of consciousness strikes me as “trivial/circular/uninformative” but I don’t rule out the possibility that someone some day might say something worthwhile.

RE: “The only thing "mysterious" is the qualitative nature of consciousness.  So, to be more specific, I'm just talking about qualitative nature of consciousness or qualia.”

I’m sorry, I don’t think this helps at all. If we’re asking what human consciousness is, we are necessarily asking, inter alia, what the “quality” of it is (and what would we even mean by quality in this instance anyway?)

The idea of so-called “qualia” has always seemed pointless to me. It’s just a little piece of jargon to describe … what? I regard the term as simply a handy way of deluding oneself into thinking one knows something one doesn’t. Jargon can often do that.

DA