Richard Dawkins' provocatively titled book of 2006 seems to have put a stake through the heart of belief in God. Science most certainly seems to have God on the ropes, so to speak. Personally, I think that's great and very healthy for all concerned. Too many wars and too much nonsense down to this "God."
Some scientific minds can nowadays often be found ridiculing God affirmers and enjoying themselves at the expense of these believers. Well, so what?
But wait, could it be true that these same scientists actually have themselves a deeply held untested belief within them? One that they will try to convince themselves is true despite a massive lack of physical evidence? Surely not! Well, actually, yes they do!
It's called The Observer. It is the scientists' own personal God Delusion - an inner watcher of all that happens. The outer watcher (God) might be on the ropes but the inner version is still going great guns. Belief in this mysterious apparition afflicts many scientists, academics, philosophers, and other interested parties studying consciousness.
Materialist theories of consciousness usually come down these days to either neuronal or quantum theories, the former generally taken much more seriously. Neural processing creates representations of external reality and these are acted upon by the brain. There is no need for any observer of any of this. And there's not one shred of physical evidence for an observer. Yet, try as they might, these Ph.D.s struggle to just let the Observer go.
Giulio Tononi starts his second paragraph for the abstract for his much-vaunted Integrated Information Theory with the sentence - "I know I am conscious: I am seeing, hearing, feeling something here, inside my own head." In the first paragraph he notes that neural activity in the cerebellum is unconscious whereas that in the cerebral cortex can give rise to consciousness. What is he saying here? That there is some Observer inside the brain? Someone that can see conscious processing but not unconscious? Surely not. And he is not the only one. Don Hoffman, Dave Chalmers, John Searle, even Mike Graziano, and many many others all apparently believe that there is someone who witnesses conscious neural processing.
They are suffering from the Observer Delusion.
And it creates so many problems. Researchers are trying to find secondary and even tertiary neural transduction to account for processing turning into representations and then back again after they've been acted upon by this mysterious observer. Even though there's no known way this could happen. A recent straw poll of consciousness researchers showed that some 75% still believed that there was a paradigm-sized explanatory gap between neural processing and conscious experience, something which I submit can only come about because they're obsessively believing in an observer of consciousness.
Now don't get me wrong. Letting go of the observer does not clear everything up and mean that we can now immediately understand consciousness. In fact it raises as many questions as it does answer them, if not more. And of course it is needed to admit to and discuss the illusion, if it is to be materialistically accounted for. Maybe that was even Tononi's reason for making those statements. But surely now it's time to put this illusion to rest and see what neural reality would look like if we were not driven to try and factor in or model an observer into the equation. If no one sees consciousness, what does this say about so-called unconscious processing, for example?
Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
Some scientific minds can nowadays often be found ridiculing God affirmers and enjoying themselves at the expense of these believers. Well, so what?
But wait, could it be true that these same scientists actually have themselves a deeply held untested belief within them? One that they will try to convince themselves is true despite a massive lack of physical evidence? Surely not! Well, actually, yes they do!
It's called The Observer. It is the scientists' own personal God Delusion - an inner watcher of all that happens. The outer watcher (God) might be on the ropes but the inner version is still going great guns. Belief in this mysterious apparition afflicts many scientists, academics, philosophers, and other interested parties studying consciousness.
Materialist theories of consciousness usually come down these days to either neuronal or quantum theories, the former generally taken much more seriously. Neural processing creates representations of external reality and these are acted upon by the brain. There is no need for any observer of any of this. And there's not one shred of physical evidence for an observer. Yet, try as they might, these Ph.D.s struggle to just let the Observer go.
Giulio Tononi starts his second paragraph for the abstract for his much-vaunted Integrated Information Theory with the sentence - "I know I am conscious: I am seeing, hearing, feeling something here, inside my own head." In the first paragraph he notes that neural activity in the cerebellum is unconscious whereas that in the cerebral cortex can give rise to consciousness. What is he saying here? That there is some Observer inside the brain? Someone that can see conscious processing but not unconscious? Surely not. And he is not the only one. Don Hoffman, Dave Chalmers, John Searle, even Mike Graziano, and many many others all apparently believe that there is someone who witnesses conscious neural processing.
They are suffering from the Observer Delusion.
And it creates so many problems. Researchers are trying to find secondary and even tertiary neural transduction to account for processing turning into representations and then back again after they've been acted upon by this mysterious observer. Even though there's no known way this could happen. A recent straw poll of consciousness researchers showed that some 75% still believed that there was a paradigm-sized explanatory gap between neural processing and conscious experience, something which I submit can only come about because they're obsessively believing in an observer of consciousness.
Now don't get me wrong. Letting go of the observer does not clear everything up and mean that we can now immediately understand consciousness. In fact it raises as many questions as it does answer them, if not more. And of course it is needed to admit to and discuss the illusion, if it is to be materialistically accounted for. Maybe that was even Tononi's reason for making those statements. But surely now it's time to put this illusion to rest and see what neural reality would look like if we were not driven to try and factor in or model an observer into the equation. If no one sees consciousness, what does this say about so-called unconscious processing, for example?
Are you willing to take that step and investigate?
via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1P2CgS5
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