Morning Must-Read: Michael Graziano vs. Rene Descartes
I believe… we don’t actually have inner feelings…
in the way most of us think we do…. The brain builds models… and those models are often not accurate…. How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t…. When we introspect and seem to find… awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels… those models are providing information that is wrong…. You might object that this is a paradox. If awareness is an erroneous impression, isn’t it still an impression? And isn’t an impression a form of awareness?… 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…. Like the intuition that white light is pure, our intuitions about awareness come from information computed deep in the brain. But the brain computes models that are caricatures of real things. And as with color, so with consciousness: It’s best to be skeptical…
That there is no single energy transition that produces a photon of white light does not mean that WhiteLight is not a thing. That subjective awareness is the mind’s approximate and subjective model of its attention processes, and that subjective awareness of one’s subjective self is the mind’s approximate and subjective model of what happens when it tries to focus its attention on itself does not mean that “consciousness” is not a thing.