Denyse O'Leary takes us back a couple of years to a claim made by Nicholas Humphrey that what we call consciousness is not real, that the phenomena of conscious experience are just an illusion. Here's Humphrey's reasoning:
Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion. The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world. So while we should concede that as conscious subjects we do have a valid experience of there being something in our minds that the rules of the physical universe doesn't apply to, this has to be all it is - the experience of something in our minds."
Since real consciousness would be non-physical, Humphreys concludes, it can't really exist because only physical entities exist. But why not draw the inference that since we have conscious experience, and since conscious experience is non-physical, therefore physical reality is not all there is?
In order to deny the existence of a non-physical level of reality Humphreys has to deny what seems obvious to everyone else, i.e. that we have genuine subjective experiences.
And what's he talking about when he says the denial of the reality of consciousness ought to be the starting assumption of science? Good heavens, how did science manage all these years without making that assumption at all, much less making it its fundamental assumption?
The starting assumption of science is, and should be, that our reason and our senses are generally reliable and that the world can be known through them.
The irony of Humphreys' remark is that it seems he has to make a conscious effort to deny the existence of consciousness. That is, he has an intention, based upon desires, based upon a belief, all of which cause him to will the statement that none of these things really exists except as chemical reactions in the brain. How, though, does a chemical reaction translate into an intention or a belief? What is the precise chemical formula which expresses a desire? Humphreys has no idea, of course. He just knows that there must be one.
RLC