[스크랩] Review: Rethinking Consciousness by M. Graziano

A Q&A with Michael Graziano

 

 

사진: 위 기사에서.

 

 

 

 

 

Reviews:

 

Michael Graziano, Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience (2019)

 

“His first, less controversial, step is to stop asking where or how consciousness is generated and instead ask how and why we attribute consciousness to others and to ourselves.

 

“Second, he makes a bold theoretical leap, suggesting that our metaphysical intuitions about our own consciousness – about being a ‘ghost in the machine’, with all manner of spooky powers – are derived from a specific internal model, the attention schema. This he likens to the more familiar body schema….

 

“What Graziano adds is that the same is true of attention. Attention is a fundamental brain resource, and to control its deployment and focus we also need an attention schema. Both models are approximations, simplifications, and therefore make revealing mistakes. Phantom limbs are an example in the case of the body schema.

 

“The cortex, Graziano explains, is an attention machine and the cortical attention schema is ‘a set of information about the process of attention itself’ (p 40). In doing so, it provides a cartoonish account of a complex process. … (p 42).

 

“What, then, is the connection between the attention schema and consciousness? This is a highly charged question given the long and confusing history of the relationship between attention and consciousness, with some theorists equating them while others describe complex causal or correlational relationships between them (Blackmore and Troscianko 2018). For Graziano, the relationship is clear,

 

“Attention is something the brain does; consciousness is something the brain says it has.” (p 110).

 

“A potential strength of the theory is that it builds on, rather than rejects, previous theories, including higher-order thought, integrated information, and especially global workspace theory (GWT).

 

“GWT has the advantage of simplicity in one respect; it claims that the contents of the GW are the contents of consciousness. Yet Graziano must lose this simple equation because his attention schema models only partially, and in simplified form, the contents of the GW.

 

“Another problem is that tying AST to the GW narrows its scope and flexibility because the attention schema can model only attentional processes going on within the GW.

 

“I have really enjoyed Graziano’s ideas but I wish he had more warmly welcomed the fact that AST is a form of illusionism. Instead, having briefly admitted as much, he distances himself from the idea because “calling consciousness an illusion is the kiss of death for a theory (p 97)

 

“Does this matter? I believe so, because while people (and I include many consciousness researchers here) go on thinking that we need to explain how consciousness arises from, or is made by, or emerges from, the brain, we are stumped. Because it doesn’t. We just imagine that it does.”

 

 

Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind (George Johnson, NYT, 7/4/2016)

 

"[C]onsciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself....

The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense

a ghostly presence — a self."

-- Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University