The "Blind Brain Theory of Consciousness" and the Consequences of Eliminativism

[Montmorency]

To see it as some kind of helpless little part of a big machine may be underrating it a bit.

But unless you can demonstrate that consciousness-in-the-brain does not neglect information - that there is no or little "medial neglect" - then all you've really got to go on is your intuition about yourself, which would be precisely what the theory dispels...

[Husar]

But unless you can demonstrate that consciousness-in-the-brain does not neglect information - that there is no or little "medial neglect" - then all you've really got to go on is your intuition about yourself, which would be precisely what the theory dispels...

Yes, but that is nothing really new, Scientology has been saying we use only 10% of our brain for years and if you consider all the information in our entire nervous system, a lot of it is already filtered out before it even gets into the brain. Functions such as breathing are pretty much automated and only enter our consciousness when we concentrate on them. Which, one could say, is a conscious act where the conscious changes the information it operates with.
I wouldn't even say there is little medial neglect, there is quite a lot because the way our consciousness works, it would be overloaded with information if it were aware of all the information at the same time. But this does not prove that there is no free will, it only means that functions our consciousness does not currently control are automated.

And this intuition you speak of, is it my awesome brain telling my conscious that it is free or is it my conscious part knowing that it has control over the rest of the brain? It gets a bit confusing when you use old words to describe a new theory that dispels the old words and the theories they're based on, my 38 computations per hour struggle to compute that behind the curtains.

[Montmorency]

Scientology has been saying we use only 10% of our brain for years

...

What?

a lot of it is already filtered out before it even gets into the brain.

We're talking about the brain.

Functions such as breathing are pretty much automated and only enter our consciousness when we concentrate on them.

But you're just saying the same old thing. Doesn't it occur that this only occurs to you because it is precisely the information that happens to reach the consciousness at a given moment?

Think about this: how is it possible that you are not fully aware of everything in your environment at any given moment? How is it possible for you to not be aware of a given word's meaning, and then to suddenly recall it? How is it possible for you not to access any given memory on demand?

conscious part knowing that it has control over the rest of the brain?

You would have to explain how that is possible, this magical ability that allows the tiny consciousness to not only exert control but to process everything it needs to somehow.

As Bakker says:

We have good reason to suppose that the information that makes it to consciousness is every bit as strategic as it is fragmental. We may only ‘see’ an absurd fraction of what is going on, but we can nevertheless assume that it’s the fraction that matters most...

Can’t we?

The problem lies in the dual, ‘open-closed’ structure of the RS. As a natural processor, the RS is an informatic crossroads, continuously accessing information from and feeding information to its greater neural environment. As a consciousness generator, however, the RS is an informatic island: only the information that is integrated finds its way to conscious experience. This means that the actual functions subserved by the RS within the greater brain—the way it finds itself ‘plugged in’—are no more accessible to consciousness than are the functions of the greater brain. And this suggests that consciousness likely suffers any number of profound and systematic misapprehensions.

And that's another thing - the theory is very robust in its predictions of how, given its facts, one would expect consciousness and/or conscious experience to look like. Like rebuilding a first-person from the inside-out, if you will.

The apparently insuperable conundrums of the first person, the consciousness we think we have, can be explained using some quite granular structural and developmental assumptions. We just need to turn our normal way of looking at things upside down–to stop viewing our metacognitive image of meaning and agency as some kind of stupendous achievement. Why? Because doing so takes theoretical metacognition at its word, something that cognitive science has shown–quite decisively–to be the province of fools. If anything, the ‘stupendous achievement’ is the one possessing far and away the greatest evolutionary pedigree and utilizing the most neural resources: environmental cognition. Taking this as our baseline, we can begin diagnosing the ancient perplexities of the metacognitive image as the result of informatic occlusion and cognitive overreach.

[...]

Since the structure and function of the brain is dedicated to reliably modelling the structure and function of its environment, the brain remains that part of the environment that it cannot reliably model. BBT terms the modelling structure and function ‘medial’ and the modelled structure and function ‘lateral.’ The brain’s inability to model its modelling, it terms medial neglect. Medial neglect simply means the brain cannot cognize itself as a brain, and so must cognize itself otherwise. This ‘otherwise’ is what we call the soul, mind, consciousness, the first-person, being-in-the-world, etc.

You can not recognize yourself as a brain. You simply can't access that information. Try to understand the significance of this.

is it my awesome brain telling my conscious that it is free

Come on now, you're just rehashing things the theory deals with very early on. Try reading at least the link just above and this mini-essay.

You can't counter a proposal by saying, 'Well - what if it's actually the opposite? Yeah, I like that feel. Let's go with that.' Or, 'What if you aren't like you think you are' with 'No, I have perfect self-knowledge about my near-total lack of self-knowledge, and I decide that it's not a problem cuz I'm so good at decisions, as evidenced by me telling myself that I am.'

It gets a bit confusing when you use old words to describe a new theory that dispels the old words and the theories they're based on

Can you be more specific?

[Husar]

Come on now, you're just rehashing things the theory deals with very early on. Try reading at least the link just above and this mini-essay.

Half of them is nothing new and the other half might as well be written in Klingon, I'm sorry for wasting your time.

[Montmorency]

Half of them is nothing new and the other half might as well be written in Klingon

The latter might explain the sense of the former.

I'm sorry for wasting your time.

It's your time too, isn't it?

[The Stranger]

i suggest everyone abandon this thread and run for the hills because whatever conclusions can be drawn here, they are most likely wrong and most definitely futile.

I suggest reading Kant instead, the conclusions you will draw from that are most definitely wrong, but less likely to be futile.