| | Does the PMIR describe Dan's Attention wave process?
Metzinger mentioned in Being No One about the profound personal and social consequences that follow from fully naturalizing ourselves
On Metzinger’s view, the self – the feeling of being a mental me in charge of the physical body – is a module within consciousness activated by your brain’s neural processing. The self is categorically not some substantial, essential invariant entity, like a soul, spirit or homunculus. As he emphasizes, there are no such things as substantial selves. Consciousness is always an experienced unity; it’s always now, that is, temporally present; it convinces us that it’s real, not a representation; it transcends our ability to describe its basic elements, so is ineffable in some respects; and it has come about via evolution, thus is natural and adaptive.
from http://www.naturalism.org/metzinger.htm Conscious experience is, he suggests, a biological data format that, by generating a subjective reality for the organism, supports adaptive behavior that would otherwise be impossible:
It is easy to overlook the causal relevance of this first evolutionary step, the fundamental computational goal of conscious experience. It allowed animals to represent explicitly the fact that something is actually the case. A transparent world-model lets you discover that something is really out there, and by integrating your portrait of the world with the subjective Now, it lets you grasp the fact that the world is present. This step opened up a new level of complexity. Thus, having a global world-model is a new way of processing information about the world in a highly integrated manner. Every conscious thought, every bodily sensation, every sound and every sight, every experience of empathy or of sharing the goals of another human being makes a different class of facts available for the adaptive, flexible, and selective form of processing that only conscious experience can provide. (p. 59) |