Beyond the Subjectivity Trap by Martin O'Dea

Author:Martin O'Dea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: subjectivity, consciousness, evolution, physicalism, functionalism, genetics, DNA, information, AI, hard problem, thought, egocentricity, mind-body problem, science, matter, physics, quantum physics, Einstein, technology
ISBN: 9781845408329
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2015
Published: 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

John Searle and David Chalmers are often placed to the fore of this grouping. Chalmers is often linked to his so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’. It is very much worth reading all of this, of course. The general idea, however, is that what occurs in a brain is not-computable. There is a vast array of information being processed by the brain, yet it all arrives as one piece. How does it all come together to give this sense of ‘I am one person and this is happening to this singular entity’? This is the so-called ‘binding problem’.

To be perfectly honest, there is already a massive amount of work offered by others in countering these points. Certainly Daniel Dennett’s work in, for example, Consciousness Explained looks at a lot of the oft-cited thought experiments around phenomenology. I would suggest looking at Dennett’s work; in it he proposes the idea of the multiple-drafts theory of consciousness. This deals with things such as time lapses between what we feel is our conscious ‘I’ and what science tells us is happening at the neuronal level, by stating that the ‘becoming aware’ happens repeatedly at different levels. I don’t agree with this as a final theory, and feel that it still does not address the locus of the ‘I’, because by dispersing it - it is still accepting it. I would suggest, though, that many of the ‘philosophical’ arguments as to why there must be a consciousness, and why it is not to be found in the mechanics of the brain, are dealt with and dismissed superbly in Dennett’s work. Again, though, for the majority of commentators we must acknowledge that they still do not believe that consciousness can be found in the brain - I can’t write that these days without screaming shortly thereafter, ‘WHERE IN THE NAME OF ... DO YOU THINK IT IS LOCATED, IN YOUR FRIDGE?!’

I think another very useful read towards understanding the lack of consciousness is the work of Thomas Metzinger. Metzinger, in his phenomenal self-model, explained in Being No One, really is shining a light on the illusory nature of what we assume consciousness is.

In Metzinger’s talks on the phenomenal self-model - which you can watch online - there is a receding of the smokescreen of conscious subjective experience as we are introduced to a number of neurological disorders and known ‘consciousness’-based anomalies, such as phantom limbs and notions of having conscious control of things that everyone else clearly understands as beyond their ‘imagined’ control.

Metzinger includes explanations of this by showing the core of what we deem to be consciousness as certain phenomena including the sense of oneself, and you being the centre-point from where you ‘see’/experience the world. Again, there are some great examples here such as the rubber hand illusion; which hint strongly at the fact that conscious experience itself is a charade of sorts.

The rubber hand illusion works as follows: an experimenter blocks your view of one of your hands with a partition and replaces

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