Consciousness and the Fallacy of Misplaced Objectivity
Francesco Ellia, Jeremiah Hendren, Matteo Grasso, Csaba Kozma, Garrett Mindt, Jonathan Lang, Andrew Haun, Larissa Albantakis, Melanie Boly & Giulio Tononi
Neuroscience of Consciousness 7 (2):1-12 (2021)
Abstract
Objective correlates—behavioral, functional, and neural—provide essential tools for the scientific study of consciousness. But reliance
on these correlates should not lead to the ‘fallacy of misplaced objectivity’: the assumption that only objective properties should and
can be accounted for objectively through science. Instead, what needs to be explained scientifically is what experience is intrinsically—
its subjective properties—not just what we can do with it extrinsically. And it must be explained; otherwise the way experience feels
would turn out to be magical rather than physical. We argue that it is possible to account for subjective properties objectively once we
move beyond cognitive functions and realize what experience is and how it is structured. Drawing on integrated information theory,
we show how an objective science of the subjective can account, in strictly physical terms, for both the essential properties of every
experience and the specific properties that make particular experiences feel the way they do.
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2022-05-13
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39 ( #21,269 of 69,212 )
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