Michael Graziano’s eliminativism
What exactly is Michael Graziano an eliminativist about?
According to Footnotes2plato Graziano’s view is that
“We are brain networks running a linguistic program whose only power is that it can make claims about itself, statements about what it believes is going on and what its own and other people’s intentions are. These beliefs, claims, and intentions have no bearing on what is actually going on inside the skull or beyond it, since their meanings are epiphenomenal to computations in the brain and the motion of matter through spacetime.”
However, this this isn’t the impression I get from the bits I’ve read.
According to Footnotes2plato Graziano’s view is that
“We are brain networks running a linguistic program whose only power is that it can make claims about itself, statements about what it believes is going on and what its own and other people’s intentions are. These beliefs, claims, and intentions have no bearing on what is actually going on inside the skull or beyond it, since their meanings are epiphenomenal to computations in the brain and the motion of matter through spacetime.”
However, this this isn’t the impression I get from the bits I’ve read.
Comments (16)
https://behavioralscientist.org/rethinking-consciousness-a-qa-with-michael-graziano/
Well, except for this claim of his, I guess :yawn:
On the basis of what, specifically?
Obviously experts can be and frequently are wrong, but if your impression, as a layman, of someone with a doctorate in the field in question "is absolutely clueless", a lot of times the problem is on your end.
And especially on this topic, given the propensity towards willful misunderstandings/misrepresentations of eliminativism by people strongly (but largely uncritically) committed to a naive/folk dualistic metaphysic.
Already here he is wrong (well, as he sees it that way, it's up to him). This is total nonsense. I don't know what he is supposed to eliminate but viewing us like this cannot hold anything good in store.
Sounds like you know something about the subject. Care to give us all a tutorial. Serious request.
Most theories of consciousness, says Neuroscientist Michael Graziano, rely on magic. They point to a feature of the brain—vibrating neurons for instance—and claim that feature to be the source of consciousness. The story ends there. The magician points to his hat—vibrating neurons—and pulls out a rabbit—consciousness.
But how does the hat produce the rabbit? By what mechanism would neural vibrations lead a brain to become aware of itself?
EN: What do you think the conception of consciousness will be in 300 years?
MG: The kind of consciousness in the brain is, I think at this point, really clear. It’s part of the style of information processing. That general conception I don’t think is going to change. But there’s a lot of ways that you could build consciousness, and I’ll go out on a limb here. There are things that I think are coming if you look into the future. If consciousness is buildable, which I think it is, if the human brain is just giant, massive information processor, which I think it is, if the technology for scanning the brain improves, which it obviously will, you reach this kind of conclusion that at some point we will be scanning the pattern of functional connectivity in a brain and collecting the data and simulating it or duplicating it in other formats, artificial computer formats.[/quote]
The brain doesn't work by processing information. It works through specific biological mechanisms including neurons. We don't yet know the critical mechanisms, but we find out more every day. We can point to specific neurons that are involved in orientation in space, and alter them to create false memories (in mice). This isn't "magic".
"Information" is not what does the work in the brain. It's not what does the work in a computer either. In a computer it's electrical circuitry. In the brain it's neuronal activity.
I think in 300 years, and hopefully sooner if we do pin down the biological mechanisms of consciousness before then, we will look back and laugh at the idea that you could build it with a computer program.
Um, no? Why would me requesting to know on what basis someone is claiming that Graziano "is absolutely clueless" imply that I'm looking to give a "tutorial"?
If you claim that someone is clueless (on a subject in which they hold a doctorate and have produced a respectable body of scholarship, no less), you probably should have some particular basis for that claim, and so I'm curious to know what it is here, especially given how prone eliminativism is to getting wildly strawmanned.
It was a request, not a question about your state of mind. A request that you rejected gracelessly. We can leave it at that.
:roll:
Sounds a lot like computationalism. If computers can be conscious, how will we verify that? Which computers, exactly, are conscious? Are some computers already conscious? Why are brains conscious? Because they compute? Is anything that computes conscious?
Brains don't compute, like computers. All processes in the brain run just like processes in the physical world. Without a program directing them, as in the computer. Just like processes in the physical world follow a path of least resistance, so do brain processes. The path is determined by connection strengths (corresponding to the width of synapses) between neurons, which are determined by parallel activation by the senses. Different collectives running on the neural substrate correspond to different aspects of consciousness. These aspects can run in resonance with the physical world. Creating a consciousness of space and together with memory (strength structures) create the experience of time.
So what else in the physical world is conscious besides brains? Rivers? Electric currents?
No, rivers are dead (but they contain a part necessary for consciousness, as we drink water). Only a brain structure that is able to "resonate" with a river sees the river. The river projects into the eye and induces a process of collective currents of sodium ion motions, which propagate on the axons paths and meet resistances at the synapses, which can be strengthened by widening. These motions (unlike the electrical currents in computers) are not pulled or pushed by an external voltage at the neuron bodies, which serve mainly as transit stations for the incoming currents.