There they go again: Count on the New York Times to publish anti-human exceptionalism pieces in its opinion section or magazine at least twice a month.
In this edition, Michael S. Graziano asks the question, “Are We Really Conscious? I’ll bet you can guess the answer.
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.
But what a “twig!”
Contrary to Graziono’s reductionism, in the hundreds of millions of years of life on earth, only we are rational. Only we are moral agents. Only we truly create. And only we have escaped the chains of natural selection and taken a step outside of evolution. Indeed, there are those who wish to “seize control of evolution” and intelligently design humans in our own image.
And only we created a new species as joyful and useful as dogs. Hardly a twig.
Also, only we are truly conscious. No we’re not!
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.