A 25-Year-Old Bet about Consciousness Has Finally Been Settled

[Laird]

From about a month ago:

A 25-Year-Old Bet about Consciousness Has Finally Been Settled by John Horgan in Scientific American on June 26, 2023

Back to the bet between Koch and Chalmers: They agreed that, for Koch to win, the evidence for a neural signature of consciousness must be “clear.” That word “clear” doomed Koch. “It’s clear that things are not clear,” Chalmers said, and Koch, grimacing, concurred. He stalked off the stage and reappeared with a case of wine as the audience laughed and applauded.

Koch then doubled down on his bet. Twenty-five years from now, he predicted, when he will be age 91 and Chalmers will be age 82, consciousness researchers will achieve the “clarity” that now eludes them. Chalmers, shaking Koch’s hand, took the bet.

“I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, “but I suspect I’ll win.” I suspect so, too. I bet consciousness will be even more baffling in 2048 than it is today. I hope to live long enough to see Koch give Chalmers another case of wine.

The materialist mind=brain scientists just will not give up. This is just a minor setback to them - it's still just a matter of time. Their entire world view, grounded in the "mind from muck" Darwinist RM + NS mantra, is at stake. From https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/neuros...sness-yet/ :

Neurology of mind scientist Anil Seth’s own approach is the “beast machine theory” expounded in his book Being You, that consciousness is merely the controlled hallucinations that our brain uses to try to keep us alive. As he told the British Festival of Neuroscience gathering in 2021,

(From https://www.technologynetworks.com/neuro...021-347650 ):

“The real problem can be expressed very simply. How can mechanisms and processes in the brain and the body explain, predict and control properties of consciousness?”

This approach aims to “dissolve” rather than “solve” the hard problem, said Seth, by breaking the “big, scary mystery” of consciousness down into smaller problems that researchers can attempt to experimentally answer. Seth focused on two of these smaller problems in his plenary — how can we explain the content of our consciousness and how can we explain the experience of conscious self?

A Busy Brain
That’s one busy brain, isn’t it, beavering away at creating hallucinations in a universe without purpose? Essentially, we are to keep trying materialist theories in simple, modest faith until one of them fits. And never doubt that that is the right approach.

And in the middle of it all, we keep running into findings that don’t fit the pattern, like this paper in Nature from Monash University:

From https://scitechdaily.com/century-old-par...nectivity/ :

"However, a recent study led by the team at Monash University’s Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health has examined more than 10,000 distinct maps of human brain activity and discovered that the overall shape of an individual’s brain has a much more substantial impact on our cognitive processes, emotions, and behavior than its intricate neuronal connectivity.

“We have long thought that specific thoughts or sensations elicit activity in specific parts of the brain, but this study reveals that structured patterns of activity are excited across nearly the entire brain, just like the way in which a musical note arises from vibrations occurring along the entire length of a violin string, and not just an isolated segment,” he [James Pang] said."

So much for the quest for the "consciousness center" in the brain.

That study from Monash University almost seems like a reinvention of the discredited idea of Phrenology. While it's certainly not the same thing, I suspect that after having its day in the sun, the new interpretation too will fade into obscurity.

"Neurology of mind scientist Anil Seth’s own approach is the “beast machine theory” expounded in his book Being You, that consciousness is merely the controlled hallucinations that our brain uses to try to keep us alive."  
(From https://evolutionnews.org/2023/07/neuros...sness-yet/)

I just noticed this. It strikes me as one of the more sophomoric blunders incorporated in the tissue-thin arguments presented by these materialist neuroscience writers in trying to furnish an explanation of how the mind is a function of the physical brain. 

What is a hallucination? It is a distortion of already existing consciousness, where nonexistent things are perceived. So what or who is it that is having this hallucination of consciousness? Seth's theory presumes the prior existence of what he is trying to explain, so he explains nothing. This is just a reassertion that consciousness is created by the brain, not a reasoned argument. What nonsense.