Neuroscientist: awareness is cartoonish caricature of reality

Photo credit: Yuri Yu. Samoilov / Foter / CC BY

Neuroscientist Michael S. A. Graziano recommends to readers of the Sunday New York Times his attention schema theory of consciousness. Is it a good advancement over other theories? Pay attention and become aware of what transpires in his opinion piece:

In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.

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.

I would like to offer a syllogism to clarify the issue:

1. If one knows for a fact that conscious experience is a cartoonish caricature of physical reality, then there must be an alternative account of what it is like to experience the world more accurately.

2. There is no alternative account of what it is like to experience the world more accurately.

3. Therefore, no one knows for a fact that conscious experience is a cartoonish caricature of physical reality.

The force of my argument lies in taking the claim of cartoonishness and caricature seriously. If the claim can’t be justified by a plausible alternative account,  then we should dismiss it as incoherent. To say that an amoeba or a computer experiences the world more accurately than we do is absurd, because they do not experience the world at all. The materialist is better off simply sticking with the claim that experiences don’t exist, rather than denigrating their accuracy. This is the law of excluded middle at work.

Notice that I am not refuting the attention schema theory of consciousness outright; I am just striking this one popular characterization of it from the realm of intelligibility.

For some good work on consciousness,  mental events, neuronal firings, and the ontology required for all of them, check out J.P. Moreland’s latest book, The Soul.