Evolution Icon Evolution

Big-Brained Scientist Says We Aren’t Conscious

14601014695_30cfe1972d_z.jpg

Count on the New York Times to publish anti-human exceptionalism pieces in its opinion section or magazine at least twice a month. This time, Princeton neuroscientist Michael S. Graziano asks the question, "Are We Really Conscious?" I’ll bet you can guess the answer.

You know the drill. First, make humans seem as puny as possible:

What is our relationship to the diversity of life? Darwin answered that one. Biologically speaking, we’re not a special act of creation. We’re a twig on the tree of evolution.

What a "twig!" Contrary to Graziono’s reductionism, in the hundreds of millions of years of complex life on Earth, only we are rational. Only we are moral agents. Only we truly create. Indeed, there are those who wish to "seize control of evolution" and intelligently design humans in our own image. And only we bred a creature as joyful and useful as dogs. Hardly a twig.

Also, only we are truly conscious. Or are we?

The argument here is that there is no subjective impression; there is only information in a data-processing device. When we look at a red apple, the brain computes information about color. It also computes information about the self and about a (physically incoherent) property of subjective experience.

The brain’s cognitive machinery accesses that interlinked information and derives several conclusions: There is a self, a me; there is a red thing nearby; there is such a thing as subjective experience; and I have an experience of that red thing. Cognition is captive to those internal models. Such a brain would inescapably conclude it has subjective experience.

But none of what we think we experience really exists:

In this theory, awareness is not an illusion. It’s a caricature. Something — attention — really does exist, and awareness is a distorted accounting of it.

Isn’t this just a variation of Plato’s shadows on the cave wall? 

And more reductionism from slightly earlier in the piece:

The "attention schema" theory of consciousness…would evolve in any complex brain.

Except it hasn’t in any other species but us (with the possible exception of Neanderthals, to whom we are related).

Granted, I am not a neuroscientist. But my data processing device tells me that Graziano’s theory is one only a big-brained caricaturist could conjure. 

Image credit: Allan Ajifo/Flickr.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

Share

Tags

scienceViews