Exploring the hard problem using science.

Competing hypotheses to be tested.
https://singularityhub.com/2021/06/02/wh...-theories/

Is it time to give up on consciousness as 'the ghost in the machine'?

But science has not yet reached a consensus on the nature of consciousness – which has important implications for our belief in free will and our approach to the study of the human mind.

Beliefs about consciousness can be roughly divided into two camps. There are those who believe consciousness is like a ghost in the machinery of our brains, meriting special attention and study in its own right. And there are those, like us, who challenge this, pointing out that what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery



https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-t...ine-160688

Competing hypotheses to be tested.
https://singularityhub.com/2021/06/02/wh...-theories/

At a high level, I like the sound of this. Though the details seem to be a contest between frontal brain and back of brain hypotheses. Certainly the results may be interesting.

I can understand that "awareness" can be used metaphorically to understand certain physical processes but it still doesn't explain why we experience awareness.  It takes a "ghost in the machine" to experience awareness in the first place, or maybe just a ghost connected to the machine.  Who is it that is aware and why are computers and electric toasters and other machines that process information not aware?  Nothing is any closer to being explained.

Seems like some fundamentalist atheists trying to skew results in their favor.

I'll be curious to see if Kastrup says anything about it, and whether it's worth taking seriously. Seems like Kastrup - along with the rest of the Essentia Foundation - is in favor of using science to explore consciousness, so these guys are just revealing their religious allegiance to physicalism and confusing this with "Science".

edit: This comment by Tom Hollows lays it out well ->

Really amusing article. It claims that none of us have any form of free will and that consciousness is merely epiphenomenal and of no use. Must have been reading either a lot of Daniel Dennett or Buddhist pseudoscience, and then extrapolating a conclusion and massaging data into a nice graph that matches your supposedly amazing insight.

This is absolute hogwash, and solving the small problem of consciousness, i.e. what are the neural correlates that in combination lead to consciousness, and how do they work, does not explain why there is a unique point of observation (presumably for each of us) and why we aren’t p-zombies.

If you want to go down the road of no free will and surrender to the void, enjoy yourselves, but it’s a strange hill to die on. I think that you’re trying to answer a basically unanswerable question that won’t be solved, and you aren’t the first or last person to think that you are smart enough to have the ultimate answer.