We Really ARE Conscious!

To date, I haven't written anything reactionary; however, it's also important to accept that truth does not exist in a vacuum, hence the reason for this post. The subject of debate is the opinion article in the New York Times entitled, "Are We Really Conscious?" written by Princeton-educated Michael Graziano PhD (in neuroscience) and currently an associate professor at his alma mater. His psychology work is just one part of his CV, which also includes 3 literary novels, children's books, and symphonic works.

While I haven't delved into these works to discover their merit, I think his most recent work in the New York Times is ‘more of the same’ when it comes to the sophistry of the modern academic sciences. While I certainly cannot hope to refute his claims on grounds of neuroscience (his expertise), I must demonstrate a number of fallacious assumptions made on logical and philosophical grounds (my expertise).

To summarize the opinion, Dr. Graziano is presenting his "attention schema" theory of human consciousness. The theory begins by defining two terms:

attention: a physical phenomenon

awareness: our brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of our attention

The example he uses of the theory in practice is our perception of light. The wavelength of the light is the true attention of the light, or in his words, "a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip." The occurrence of the light, therefore, is something entirely quantitative, whereas our brain creates the "cartoonish reconstruction of attention" that we know as 'color', which is our awareness. While the quality of color has been assumed to be only a construct of the human mind since the Enlightenment philosophers, science has proven that white light is actually comprised of light with many different wavelengths, meaning that light is comprised of many (in fact, all) colors. Therefore, the attention is that data of many wavelengths/colors and the awareness is what we'd mistakenly call "white light".

What does this have to do with consciousness? Dr. Graziano equates our brains as informational storehouses, like computers, whose sole purpose is to retain and process information. The subject of consciousness arises when faced with the difficult question of why the brain would inefficiently waste energy on defining itself as something separate from its surroundings and be aware that its experiences are subjective. He then presents his attention schema theory to explain consciousness as a rude approximation of the information it processes, similar to how white light is only an erroneous estimation of all colors together.

However, a critical look at Dr. Graziano’s distrust for our intellect reveals a misplaced trust in the inventions created by our very own intellect. (I will, for the purposes of this post, roughly equate Dr. Graziano’s term ‘awareness’ to the term, ‘intellect’, because it is our intellect with which we interpret the information received from our senses) Our intellect was the creational source of the computer, the camera, and the spectrometer; these human inventions are as limited in their design as their poor human inventors. Returning to Dr. Graziano's example of the computer chip, it is our intellects that program that computer chip to recognize wavelengths. They do not function any different than how we designed them to function, and if they see phenomena that we don’t, it is only because we possessed the intellect to speculate that phenomena’s existence.

Even the scientific terminology used by Dr. Graziano is a creation of the human intellect of which we should be skeptical. Pre-modern science, we created the vocabulary of ‘green’ and ‘white’ light because those are the terms we used to describe the phenomenon of different kinds of light. With modern science, we created the vocabulary of ‘495 nm < λ < 570 nm’ and ‘390 < Σλ < 700 nm’ to describe the exact same phenomenon. Both vocabularies are constructs of our own intellects, intended to conform to an external reality and differentiated only by their specificity. And still, our scientific expression is limited by the understanding of our intellect. Just as Newton’s theory of gravitation was not the final word, so too many of our other constructs of intellect (i.e. the color of light, the wavelength of light, etc.) will be overturned again and again as our intellect struggles to grasp the natural cosmos. So in this sense, we cannot escape from our own intellect!

These were the words chosen by Dr. Graziano, but for the sake of argument, we can assume that Dr. Graziano oversimplified his definition of 'attention' for the benefit of the reader. An alternate understanding may be the true nature of the phenomenon itself that is unknown to us at the time. For example, before Newton, scientists did not yet realize that white light was comprised of all colors of the visible spectrum and they their combined wavelength creates white light. Now, let's suppose that this is the correct understanding of light as it really is (meaning, that this is what white light essentially is, and no further modification to our electromagnetic theory will be ever necessary). This makes the definition of attention to be independent of anything man-made.

But even with this understanding, Dr. Graziano still commits two debilitating errors: one logical and the other epistemological. The logical error, being the more rudimentary, we will examine first. Dr. Graziano uses man’s mistaken postulate that white light is purely a single color to cast doubt over the existence of man’s consciousness. He uses the erroneous attribution of quality of one thing to demonstrate the erroneous attribution of existence to another. As with the popular saying concerning "apples and oranges", this is not a logically coherent analogy. Basic logic instructs that attributes are predicates of the subject. For example, the statement, “White light is not a single color” has ‘white light’ as the subject, and “not a single color” as a negative predicate attributed to that subject. However, it would be absurd to say, “White light is NOT” or rather, “White light does not exist” because obviously the phenomena of unified light does exist or else we would not be theorizing about it. The equivalent would be to first claim, “Gravity is not a kinematic force,” (which is predicted by theory and has been supported by repeated experimentation) then to claim, “Gravity does not exist,” after which, to test this claim, one must simply jump off a 10-story building to realize his error. Dr. Graziano assumes that existence is an attribute that we associate with a thing, like the green color of grass (or photosynthesizing chlorophyll, if we want to be scientifically accurate). He then carries his error with him in the analogy to the existence of one’s consciousness, mistaking attribute for existence and proposing a comparison that fails under the scrutiny of logic.

At a deeper philosophical level, Dr. Graziano also mistakes the object apprehended by the intellect to be scientific fact. Rather, the immediate object of our intellect is ‘being’ per se and not the quality, quantity, or any attributes whatsoever. The intellect, guided by the light of Reason, apprehends the existence of phenomena with certainty. While it is historically true that our intellect mistakenly believed that white light was unique from green light (and not composed of all colors), our intellect remains certain of the existence of the phenomenon that we describe as ‘white light’.

Therefore, acceptance of Dr. Graziano’s theory serves only to submerge the reader beneath the quicksand of his initial premise: skepticism. Doubt in our own intellect undercuts the vast expanse of theories and hypotheses that comprise the natural sciences, not to mention our very rational existence. Any honest intellect that chooses to accept this initial premise must commit intellectual suicide, and make vegetables out of their own mind.

To the contrary, a disciplined intellect is the cause of truth in the mind, though truth is by no means easy to obtain. It is with great difficulty that we arrive at truth. Therefore, while misuse of one’s intellect results in error, well-reasoned and careful application of the intellect yields the fruit of certain truths.