Consciousness as a brain function

[Alan V]

According to the book Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene

I find Dehaene's reasons for dismissing the hard problem of consciousness to be too simple.

First, he says that consciousness can be explained by the fact that "molecular machinery inside our cells forms a self-reproducing automaton."

But how does an automaton give an individual subject conscious experience? The whole point is to avoid some kind of miniature homunculus which exists inside the brain, doing our experiencing for us.

Then he says, "the science of consciousness will keep eating away at the hard problem until it vanishes." Which would be big if true. But the example he gives of how this is supposed to happen explains nothing: "current models of visual perception already explain not only why the human brain suffers from a variety of visual illusions but also why such illusions would appear in any rational machine confronted with the same computational problem." [p.314]

That the brain suffers from illusions in no way addresses the jump from sensory input through the nerves to experience.

So it may be a good book on the correlation between brain activity and consciousness -- in other words, "When we are conscious, this and this happen." But it doesn't address how electrochemical events in the brain are experienced by subjects.

If he does a better job of this later on, maybe you can find it. I didn't.

Giving Dehaene the benefit of the doubt, unconscious processing has a lot to do with why we experience the subjective states we do, and understanding how the brain creates our visual, auditory, and tactile pictures of reality will go a long way in "eating away at the hard problem," as you quoted.

But in my own opinion, too many consciousness researchers still take our consciousness to be our self, when our self is much older evolutionarily.  Dr. Allan Hobson was one such researcher in my experience, and we disagreed on this point in our discussions.

So the real short answer to the hard problem may be that we experience subjective states because they literally happen to us, our bodies.  There is no need for a homunculus when a single body with a working brain, a self, is required.

The fact that all of our sensory experiences are centered on our bodies is evidence that our bodies are our selves. Also, the fact that we experience internals states which no one else has access to is evidence that we are our bodies. And of course we have access to the full range of the evolutionary history of our nervous systems internally: reflexes, instincts, emotions, attention, consciousness, and self-consciousness. The self-concept of our self-consciousness is just one aspect of this larger self, and it was obviously a later development evolutionarily, though we confuse the picture of our selves in our minds with the realities existing in the objective world.