What If Consciousness Comes First?
This is sad. We have good functional accounts of consciousness (Global Workspace theory [0], Attention Schema theory [1], recent robotics work on self-attention [2]). These explain much of the specific phenomenology of conscious experience. However Rawlette clearly is completely unfamiliar with this extensive and deeply empirical literature.<p>&quot;Armchair philosophy&quot; like this still gets published way too much, and is given way too much respect. Rawlette, typical of this genre, believes that &quot;conceivability&quot;, thought experiments independent of empirical facts, and verbal theorizing can justify beliefs more strongly than actual research.<p>For good philosophy in this domain, read people like Andy Clark [3].<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_workspace_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_workspace_theory</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_schema_theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Attention_schema_theory</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;hod-lipson-is-building-self-aware-robots-20190711&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;hod-lipson-is-building-self-a...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andy_Clark" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Andy_Clark</a>