Consciousness: computer scientist says it is real (General)

by David Turell , Monday, January 20, 2020, 19:00 (1767 days ago) @ David Turell

The opinion of Bernardo Kastrup:

https://iai.tv/articles/the-mysterious-disappearance-of-consciousness-auid-1296

"...the intractability of the problem has led some to even claim that consciousness doesn’t exist at all: Daniel Dennett and his followers famously argue that it is an illusion, whereas neuroscientist Michael Graziano proclaims that “consciousness doesn’t happen. It is a mistaken construct.” Really?

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"Don’t get me wrong, the motivation behind the denial is obvious enough: it is to tackle a vexing problem by magically wishing it out of existence. As a matter of fact, the ‘whoa-factor’ of this magic gets eliminativists and illusionists a lot of media attention. But still, what kind of conscious inner dialogue do these people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue? Short of assuming that they are insane, fantastically stupid or dishonest—none of which is plausible—we have an authentic and rather baffling mystery in our hands.

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"Consciousness seems immaterial—his argument goes—simply because, in order to focus attention on survival-relevant tasks, the model fails to incorporate superfluous details of brain anatomy and physiology. In Graziano’s words, “the brain describes a simplified version of itself, then reports this as a ghostly, non-physical essence.”

"This is all very reasonable. The problem is that it has nothing to do with phenomenal consciousness. Graziano’s authoritative prose disguises a sleight of hand: he implicitly changes the meaning he attributes to the term ‘consciousness’ as he develops the argument. He starts by talking about subjective experience—i.e. phenomenal consciousness, which is what science can’t explain—just to end up explaining something else entirely: our ability to cognize ourselves as agents and metacognitively represent our own mental contents.

"...what is meant by phenomenal consciousness [is] what it feels like to lift a heavy bag, have your tongue burned by hot tea or hit your head against a wall isn’t “ethereal” at all (try the wall if you doubt me). There is remarkably little in Graziano’s argument to justify the rather ambitious title of his essay.

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"Keith Frankish—an illusionist—published an essay on Aeon making the case that consciousness is, well, an illusion. Never mind the fact that illusions are experiential and therefore presuppose consciousness; the subtitle of his essay—“Phenomenal consciousness is a fiction written by our brains” (emphasis added)—gave me hope that he would face the core issue head-on, instead of throwing a smokescreen of conceptual obfuscation.

"Disappointingly, however, Frankish already starts out by conflating science with the metaphysics of materialism and then weaving a blatantly circular argument:

“It is phenomenal consciousness that I believe is illusory. For science finds nothing qualitative in our brains, any more than in the world outside. The atoms in your brain aren’t coloured and they don’t compose a colourful inner image.”

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“'it is not only illusionists who must address this problem. The notion of mental representation is a central one in modern cognitive science, and explaining how the brain represents things is a task on which all sides are engaged.”

"I regard this as outright misdirection. Yes, the mechanisms of mental representation in general aren’t fully understood, but that’s not the salient issue here. What is salient is this: only illusionists have to account for the experience of ‘seeming’—i.e. illusion—while denying experience to begin with. That’s the point, not mental representation in general.

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"If Frankish and Graziano’s arguments are based on question-begging, conceptual obfuscation and sleights of hand, where does this leave us regarding the mystery I originally set out to elucidate?

"My present opinion is that illusionists and eliminativists are sincere, but also so fanatically committed to a particular metaphysics—materialism—that they inadvertently conjure up, and then tie themselves in, perplexing webs of conceptual indirection, ultimately deceiving themselves.

"They defer tackling the salient questions with layer upon layer of smoke and mirrors just to admit, at the very end, that the questions haven’t actually been addressed. However, by adding and then wrestling with all those artificial in-between layers, they get the impression that progress has been made, only one step being left at the end.

"But in fact nothing has been accomplished, nothing at all. The ‘problems’ they solve aren’t real problems to begin with, just conjured-up artifacts of conceptual fog. There is nothing of any substance or relevance prior to the “tough question” of “how does a brain state represent a phenomenal property” if experience—as they allege—doesn’t exist.

"Despite all this, here we are, discussing eliminativism and illusionism because—bewilderingly—these views have acquired a degree of academic respectability. Such is the state in which we find Western philosophy."

Comment: Saying it is an illusion solves nothing. What we experience is real enough to us and works.