My commentary on Philip Goff’s Galileo’s Error for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, along with papers by Carlo Rovelli, Sean Carroll, Anil Seth, Galen Strawson, and others will be published in a special issue of JoCS in October 2021. In the meantime, my piece is available now on my website.
I attempted another bite-sized post, this time on the twin illusions of self / conscious will:
Decision-making is a process in nature. And a beautiful one at that, in which the ever-changing dance of electrical firing in the brain is in constant dialog with the outside world and other beings…
This post is a brief response to the claim that “we have evidence consciousness is brain-based.” The full case requires more text, but I made an attempt at a bite-sized version here:
Until we attain a significantly more advanced understanding of the brain, and of many other systems in nature for that matter, we’re forced to begin with one of two assumptions: either consciousness arises at some point in the physical world, or it is a fundamental part of the physical world (some, or all)…
The conclusion we draw about life, once we understand the reductionist story is: There’s nothing fundamentally new going on—all the ingredients were always there. “Life” is just molecules behaving like molecules under certain conditions (beginning with the ability to self-replicate). No injection of a magical tonic is required to breathe life into those atoms….
Click here to continue reading my post on the life / consciousness analogy
If we want to explain consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, we have to think carefully about what this means…