Monday, December 28, 2020

Michael S.A. Graziano - Rethinking Consciousness (WW Norton, 2019) ***


 Understanding our human consciousness remains one of the toughest scientific nuts to crack. Graziano takes a very optimistic and mechanical view of our consciousness. He claims that in theory it would be possible to recreate consciousness with the right ingredients available: attention, attention schema, content. 

Graziano acknowledges that the hardest part to resolve is emotions. And that is possibly also the weakness of his approach and ambition, including uploading consciousness into a machine. Apart from the question how useful, wishful or interesting this would be, who would actually want this? 

His engineering approach to consciousness may lead to some interesting conceptual questions and challenges, but it brings us back to square one. "The single most important change that I can see - the watershed moment in the history of our species - is the moment people understand consciousness. Once we understand it from a pragmatic, engineering point of view, then a remarkable future becomes possible. In that future, mind is something precious, something to be nurtured, grown, and then saved, something that can be lifted from the original biological platform and migrated, duplicated, branched, maintained indefinitely, and even possibly merged with other minds". 

How horrifying! Does that mean that this mind is completely devoid of sensual pleasure, no bodily contacts, no cuddling of a grandchild, no intimacy, not even a hug, let alone sex, no enjoyment of music, literature, paintings? No enjoyment of food, smell, sports? What is a mind without a body? Who would want to be locked up in a computer or even in a robot? Would we not need a physical 'self' to be able to form this attention schema, to have a mental concept of ourselves? How can this be without a body? 

I may have more questions than answers after reading Graziano's book, but it's still worth reading, if only to challenge our current thinking and to project a vision of the future, even if it sounds horrifying. 

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