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user-inactivated · 4520 days ago · link · · parent · post: The Ghost in the Machine: Unraveling the Mystery of Consciousness
Contemporary neuroscience follows Descartes in conceptualizing consciousness as something that occurs internally. The difference is that for Descartes, the soul was the ghost in the machine, while for neuroscientists, the ghost is the machine.
That seems to be the crux of the whole article right there. And the space in between the reductionistic determinism v FREE WILL is pretty big. It seems like that that space is a "feature not a bug" and the ambiguity that is defined between these two understandings of human consciousness, at least cognitively for us great apes, has allowed us to feel the importance of the "I" after the "Thou".
While the difference is deciding who (or what), actually, the ghost is, the similarity is that both are dualistic, and, in my opinion, utter nonsense. There are lots of causal correlates that exist in the central nervous system that are indispensable to proper function, but to talk about the brain as if its an organism unto itself is conceptually off target. My favorite authors on the subject, Bennett and Hacker, have termed it the mereological fallacy (a mereology is a type of metaphor in which one ascribes an attribute of a whole to one of its constituent parts). Here is a short introduction to their writing for anyone who is interested. I agree with you that this is probably a problem of reductionism. Some things can only be appreciated as a thing and nothing less.