I'd take anything Graziano has to say with a grain of salt:
Quote for the Day – Michael Graziano Thinks Puppets Can Be Conscious
As Alex notes in the interview, Graziano just seems like someone who is trying way too hard to explain away a mystery that conflicts with his overarching paradigm and way of seeing the world.
He mentions trying to get an objective view of the brain, but what he seems to misunderstand is there's a chasm between the third person ontology that allows for reduction to structure & dynamics in other fields and the first person ontology of conscious experience. This is why you can't replace "squirrel" with "awareness" - the idea of perceiving incorrectly - as in the case of the guy who has a squirrel in his head - or correctly is part of the mystery one is trying to explain. As the famous critique of this position goes -
"If consciousness is an illusion, who precisely is being fooled?"
AFAICTell he only compounds the problem when he says brains process information and this tricks us into thinking we have consciousness. I also feel like he's mashing together definitions of information. It seems this is what he's doing: Taking the CompSci, Claude Shannon definition -
where a small number of symbols is channeled between source and receiver - and the everyday definitions -
where consciousness possessing entities exchange knowledge or obtain it from the world around them. Information in the Shannon sense is measured by the possible alternate messages eliminated by the received message. Information in the everyday sense is communicating meaning via representation, which Lanier has argued is never done by computers (
here +
here).
Of course even if we give him a pass on that it's still not clear why information processing leads to self-awareness, especially if someone has to be fooled into thinking they have consciousness. Seems like another appeal to the
miracle of thinking meat:
The only thing that seems to be an out for him is to say,
"I don’t think we need to explain how brains produce the inner experience." even though this would seem to be the crux of the problem. Perhaps, like Sam Harris, he's been forced to conclude
this is requires a nonsensical something-from-nothing type event?
After that he just seems to tumble into the usual shaming tactics, assuming authority and in group selection of the "intelligent"/"rational"/"scientific"/"reputable" who would never research the paranormal. I don't know if there's anything in that part worth commenting on other than taking note of how human herds defend their belief in platforms/paradigms by utilizing disdain.
I can't help but feel there's a desperation on Graziano's part to get, as he puts it,
"the magic out of consciousness." This may be due to what McGilChrist
refers to as the overemphasis of "left brain" thinking, which he notes cuts off information that might diminish its importance. I'll note that
Donald Hoffman has discussed the ineffectiveness of using neuroscience to disprove or prove God as it applies to some of things Graziano talks about.
Overall the interview recalls to mind a quote from Searle on the quality of physicalist/materialist explanations for consciousness:
"I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives."
-John Searle, "What's wrong with the philosophy of mind?"