Phenomenal consciousness is seen as one of the top unsolved problems in science. Nothing we can—or, arguably, even could—observe about the arrangement of atoms constituting the brain allows us to deduce what it feels like to smell an orange, fall in love, or have a belly ache. Remarkably, 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?
The denial of phenomenal consciousness is called—depending on its particular formulation—‘eliminativism’ or ‘illusionism.’ Its sheer absurdity has recently been chronicled by Galen Strawson, David Bentley Hart and yours truly, so I won’t repeat that argumentation here. My interest now is different: I want to understand what makes the consciousness of an intelligent human being deny its own existence with a straight face. For I find this denial extremely puzzling for both philosophical and psychological reasons.
What kind of conscious inner dialogue do people engage in so as to convince themselves that they have no conscious inner dialogue?
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.
The only way to go about elucidating the mystery is to investigate, with patience and an open mind, the arguments offered by eliminativists and illusionists. The cover story of last September’s issue of New Scientist, for instance, sensationally announced the discovery of the “True nature of consciousness: Solving the biggest mystery of your mind” based on an essay by Michael Graziano. In it, Graziano argues—predictably—that consciousness doesn’t actually exist.
He starts the essay by defining his usage of the term ‘consciousness’: “it isn’t just the stuff in your head. It is the subjective experience of some of that stuff” (emphasis added). Clearly, thus, Graziano is talking about phenomenal consciousness, not the other technical usages of the term. Phenomenal consciousness entails the subjective experiences that seem to accompany the material stuff going on in your head. So Graziano’s challenge is to persuade you that, despite all appearances to the contrary, those experiences don’t actually exist.
His argument rests on the idea that consciousness is adaptive: it is undoubtedly beneficial to us to recognize and understand ourselves as agents in our environment—i.e. to have a model of ourselves—if we are to survive. In this context, Graziano argues that consciousness is merely a model the brain constructs of itself, so it can “monitor and control itself”.
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.”
9th January 2020
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