The premise of the headline is a very common invalid argument that goes like this: 1) Declare (usually implicitly) with no basis whatsoever that term X has thi

The premise of the headline is a very common invalid argument that goes like this: 1) Declare (usually implicitly) with no basis whatsoever that term X has this One True Meaning. 2) Demonstrate that a common instance of things generally subsumed under term X does not have the properties implied by the arbitrary and baseless One True Meaning (implicitly) declared in step one. 3) "Conclude" that therefore the common instance of X is not "really" X. The key that this is nonsense is the use of the metaphysically loaded weasel-word "really". OK, if we aren't "really" conscious are we still just-plain-old conscious? How about conscious-enough-for-going-on-with? The argument depends on a Platonic view of concepts, which is false (if it was true it would never be possible to create a new concept, which people in Plato's time almost never did, but we do all the time.) "Consciousness" does not identify some Platonic form or Aristotelian essence, but a set of empirical properties that are a) found in organisms with a particular type of nervous system and b) lead to a range of self-regulatory behaviours and c) are intimately entwined with our self-experience. We may make false assumptions about the implications of consciousness--for example, we may assume that it is not a perfectly ordinary organic function of the brain--but there is still a phenomenological cluster whose relevance to human experience is extremely difficult to dispose of. If you for some reason really wanted to use the word "consciousness" to mean something that had nothing to do with the three characteristics listed above, you would still have those three characteristics left over, and it would still be in a position where having a single word for them would be quite convenient. For comparison, suppose we believed that the process of digestion was essentially one of combustion, but at some point we learn that in fact digestive acids and enzymes are doing something that is quite different from simple oxidation (combustion). If someone said that that point, "Do we really digest? Stomach Science Suggests We Don't" everyone would look at them rather oddly, because everyone outside of philosophy departments knows that "digestion" means "the process of breaking down food in the stomach whatever the cause of that process happens to be" rather than "this one particular explanation for the process of breaking food down in the stomach". This is not a small error, and there are entire fields of philosophy (most of post-war Continental philosophy, in my view) that are nothing but instantiations of it. "We have found that conscious is not unitary, therefore the self does not 'really' exist" is one of the more ridiculous notions of this kind. It's like someone looking under the hood of an automobile and finding that the engine can be taken apart, and then declaring (as if it was a deep insight instead of a hilarious mistake), "Internal combustion is a myth!" because it is accomplished by a machine that's decomposable into components rather than by some unitary unanalyzable magic. Only someone uncritically wedded to the idea that consciousness (or internal combustion) must really be unitary (why?) would make such a claim, and yet there is no basis in the phenomenon that requires us to insist on such a characteristic. Or it's like saying airplanes don't "really" fly because they don't flap their wings. Why would anyone think that "flapping" is a necessary property of flying to the extent that when they see something that flies without flapping they want to exclude it from the concept named by "flying" rather than modify their concept named by flying to include things that don't flap? Unless, of course, they believe in Plato's notion of concepts as rigidly fixed ideals rather than pragmatic tools that knowing subjects make and re-make to aid in our understanding of the world.