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Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.
by FeepingCreature 9y ago
Technically there's also "The brain thinks it's conscious, but has no reason to believe that. Separately, it is also conscious." Ie. Epiphenomenalism.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoThe problem with epiphenomenalism is that we are wired to behave in ways that optimize the pleasure our consciousness experiences. If consciousness was just a byproduct, there wouldn't be such a strong relationship between conscious experience and survival value.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoWe're wired to do a whole lot of things, and hedonic reward-seeking is only one of them. That said, you'd have to do the experiment to see whether a reward can be subconsciously experienced. I'd guess no, but that's just since a few experiments so far have shown that conscious experience seems to accompany the brain's processing of action rather than just passive perception.