
From scientist and novelist Michael Grazziano at the Atlantic:
It’s just the brain describing itself—to itself.
but … Wait …
Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct.
Well, that one’s been tried before. As here, it involves speculations about human evolution based on one or two slender skeins of evidence.
The human brain insists it has consciousness, with all the phenomenological mystery, because it constructs information to that effect. The brain is captive to the information it contains. It knows nothing else. This is why a delusional person can say with such confidence, “I’m a kangaroo rat. I know it’s true because, well, it’s true.” The consciousness we describe is non-physical, confusing, irreducible, and unexplainable, because that packet of information in the brain is incoherent. It’s a quick sketch.
So, if believing I am conscious can make me so, why doesn’t believing make it true for anything else? Why didn’t it work for the kangaroo rat?
Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. It’s a mistaken construct. … The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy, opinion, or religion. It’s a matter of hard science. … More.
If so,this is hardly the way to go about it.
A friend notes that he seems to be undercutting science while appealing to it. THoughts?
See also: Neuroscience tried wholly embracing naturalism, but then the brain got away
and
Would we give up naturalism to solve the hard problem of consciousness?
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The hard problem about this Michael Graziano is: is this guy simply stupid?
It seems he is not. The Wikipedia page about him depicts him as a very intelligent operator: a professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Princeton University, a novelist.
So, the hard problem about Michael Graziano becomes: how can an apparently intelligent and brilliant person say such stupid things?
I suppose that a possible answer is that his intelligence is a mistaken construct. Whatever that means.
“Let me be as clear as possible: Consciousness doesn’t happen. “
At least he proves that there are Chalmer’s zombies — the previously only hypothesized beings that behave and act exactly like humans, but there is no one home. Or maybe he is just faking the faking.
Hi News,
Philosopher Ed Feser puts his finger on the problem with the kind of approach Graziano is proposing in a 2012 post:
Or as philosopher Richard Swinburne writes in The Evolution of the Soul:
I’m surprised that Graziano does not perceive this.