The Grey Lady Grows Senile

I flipped through the week in review section of the New York Times while attending to some other, serious business in the bathroom. Thomas Friedman was comparing ISIS to kudzu. The metaphor may be mildly enlightening, but Friedmans attempts to draw policy conclusions from it just seemed silly. Nicholas Kristof, who appears to be pretty darned white, is complaining about how "White people don't get it." Maureen Dowd is writing something about some female comic book character. In short, the usual middlebrow tedium.

And then I found this, a piece questioning whether humans are actually conscious! This was a dive from middlebrow tedium into the utter depths of stupidity! And you know how utter stupidity is the La Brea Tar Pit of Callahan, so let's wade in! The piece begins:

"OF the three most fundamental scientific questions about the human condition, two have been answered."

What Graziano is actually going to ask are three philosophical questions, but he does not even know enough about philosophy to realize this. And what are they?

"First, what is our relationship to the rest of the universe? Copernicus answered that one. We’re not at the center. We’re a speck in a large place."

So we have here the usual ahistorical nonsense about the meaning of Copernicus. As if the question "What is our relationship to the rest of the universe?" can be answered by locating us physically in space! I wonder, if asked about his relationship with his significant other, Dr. Graziano answers, "I am often to the left of her, but sometimes move around to her right." On to number two:

"Second, what is our relationship to the diversity of life? Darwin answered that one. Biologically speaking, we’re not a special act of creation. We’re a twig on the tree of evolution."

Once again, by mistaking a philosophical question for a scientific one, Graziano offers a ridiculous non-answer: a fact about the historical origins of the human species is simply not up to answering the question, "Is human life special in some way?" Alexander, Buddha, Aristotle, Newton, and Napoleon all emerged from wombs, but this just doesn't get anywhere on the question of "Are these people special?" You can't refute someone who claims "America has a unique role in history" by noting that all Americans are descended from hunter-gatherers.

But let's move on to the real gem of the piece; regarding the relationship between mind and the physical world, Graziano contends: "I believe a major change in our perspective on consciousness may be necessary, a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do."

Um, Dr. Graziano, if we are not really conscious, and we have no "inner feelings," then we have no "viewpoint" to shift from either, "credulous and egocentric" or not.

From there, Graziano continues with some of the worst hand-waving nonsense I have encountered in quite some time: "The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. ["Providing it" to whom?] The machinery is computing an elaborate story about a magical-seeming property. [Who is being told this "story"?] And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information."

How in the world can this explain the fact that, say, I actually see green leaves outside my window right now?! And if somehow some meaning can be attached to the idea that I don't actually see them and this is just a mistake my brain is making... Well, then, we'd better throw Graziano's earlier "answers" to the first two of the three important questions right out the window, because the theories of Copernicus and Darwin relied entirely on things that their brains were mistakenly concluding that they were observing. And all of the neuroscience that Graziano claims to be drawing on to reach his conclusions? All of that was developed by neuroscientists based upon things their brains were tricking them into thinking they were looking at. In fact, the very idea that we have a brain is based upon the mistaken idea that when we cut open a human head, we actually see a brain in there, since, according to Graziano, we are mistaken about having been conscious of seeing anything at all.

The basic problem Graziano hasn't faced up to is this: if I can be mistaken about the fact that I feel an itch right at this moment, then there is nothing whatsoever that I can't be mistaken about, including every single observation upon which all of science is based. So Graziano's "theory" entirely undermines every bit of the science which supposedly requires it in the first place.

When Daniel Dennett declared consciousness to be an "illusion," someone said this was the worst philosophical position that had ever been put forward, as it is instantly self-refuting. But Graziano is going to double-down on this bad bet with a load of gibberish. And the NY Times published it!