I'm not saying he presumes he can do that. He's an entertaining presenter and he provides a lot of good data, but the reason he is giving the presentation is this idea of his of consciousness being good for nothing, and maybe actually detrimental in several ways. I'm critiquing his method at arriving at this conclusion, and this "some neuroscientists find the idea intriguing" as some sort of validation. It's something approximating a rhetorical sleight of hand. I'm not surprised that you don't understand the critique because you're a fan of his work and likely share approaches to things with him as a writer/literary person generally moreso than I would.
No, I don't understand because I still think you're making misplaced judgments. You think you have a more objective position because you're not invested in him personally/professionally. I think you're going out of your way to make accusations because you don't like the implications of what he's saying.
But these are personal disagreements, and won't get us anywhere.
I want to be clear when I say he's assuming all ends are met identically by disparate processes. This was what the movement example was meant to explain. A car, a bike, and walking are all methods of getting from point A to point B. Saying that bikes can't be for transportation because cars transport people faster is fallacious, and also misses that while the car is faster than the bike, the bike is faster than walking.
You're not getting the point if this is what you think he's saying.
You're arguing that consciousness can still be for all these things even if other embodied functions achieve the same ends. That's not untrue, but it's an incomplete version of the question Watts's is posing. He's responding to a well-established question among cognitive scientists/philosophers: what is consciousness for
that makes it evolutionarily beneficial for humans? In other words, what unique function does consciousness allow for that other organisms can't perform? He's not denying that consciousness can be for any of the possibilities he enumerates; he's saying that in terms of evolution, other species had already developed the capacities for these possibilities in ways that didn't involve consciousness. He's critiquing the idea that consciousness is special and achieves some purpose inconceivable in non-conscious organisms.
In terms of evolutionary development, consciousness is new to the scene. Every species evolves differently and specifically to the form of their embodied relationship to the environment; but every time we look for a function of consciousness unique to humans, we stumble upon examples of those functions in other organisms--whether self-awareness, communal play, higher-order conceptualization, future planning, etc.
It's fair to be concerned with what's manifested behaviorally because that's easier to measure. The problem is that this creates a bit of a standards problem when trying to assess something that mediates the relationship, to some degree (even if negatively), the relationship between electrochemical interactions in the nervous system, and manifest bodily behaviors. "I can't figure out how this helps or what it does, so it must be for nothing or negative" is a similar but opposite move of "God of the Gaps" thinking (which, I think might be what
@zabu of nΩd was talking about, but I'm not really sure, and I don't see myself making any such moves or claim).
Well, you seem to be saying it's not worth exploring questions if you're not going to try and find whatever god is lurking in the gaps. I simply think you're protesting too much and really just finding fault for your own sake.
Do you think Watts doesn't understand the implications of his questioning/speculation? I'm confident that he's completely cognizant of the seeming presence and simultaneous invisibility of whatever "mediates the relationship between electrochemical interactions in the nervous system and manifest bodily behaviors." I have no doubt he's obsessed with what appears to be the threefold structure of consciousness: chemicals/electricity, bodily behavior, and what communicates between those two factors. I've read enough of Watts (unlike you, I imagine) to know that this isn't something that escapes him.
If consciousness serves an evolutionary purpose unique to humans, then it should facilitate some function between embodied behavior and environment that other organisms can't do. He's saying we've yet to find that function.
Also, having read a lot of Watts, I know that he's pretty much ready to accept that consciousness might not be for any special purpose. It could just be a kind of modification on basic human anatomy that fulfills no unique or evolutionarily beneficial function. So again, it's not that consciousness isn't for anything; it's just not for any particular human specialty that can be scientifically quantified or qualified.
Most neuroscientists aren't studying consciousness. I'm saying that neuroscientists study lots of things, but mostly in rats instead of people, and then the ones studying humans aren't looking for consciousness per se. The closest thing we are getting to it is the fMRI data identifying areas for certain shapes etc (trying to read dreams etc). I'm going to discount neuroscientist opinions on something they aren't studying, especially when/if they aren't even studying humans.
I find these comments unconvincing and uninformed. There's an entire branch of neuroscience devoted to the study of consciousness. It even has its own journal.
