The Myth of When and Where: How False Assumptions Still Haunt Theories of Consciousness

Abstract

Recent advances in Neural sciences have uncovered countless new facts about the brain. Although there is a plethora of theories of consciousness, it seems to some philosophers that there is still an explanatory gap when it comes to a scientific account of subjective experience. In what follows, I will argue why some of our more commonly acknowledged theories do not at all provide us with an account of subjective experience as they are built on false assumptions. These assumptions have led us into a state of cognitive dissonance between maintaining our standard scientific practices on one hand, and maintaining our folk notions on the other. I will then end by proposing Illusionism as the only option for a scientific investigation of consciousness and that even if ideas like panpsychism turn out to be holding the seemingly missing piece of the puzzle, the path to them must go through Illusionism.

Commentary: Content-Free Awareness: EEG-fcMRI Correlates of Consciousness as Such in an Expert Meditator

“…The search for minimal neuronal requirements for consciousness rests on the premise that there exists a unique state of the human brain, the conscious state, that if one carefully excludes all the confounding cognitive functions, one will be able to isolate those regions that are involved in generating consciousness itself; nothing more, nothing less. I have argued elsewhere (Rahimian, 2021) why this view is deeply flawed and is based on unjustified assumptions mainly from folk psychology. Here I focus on some issues that arise while pursuing such assumptions in scientific paradigms.…”