When it is paying attention to thing X, we know that the brain usually attributes an experience of X to itself
This is either selection fallacy or tautology. How do we know what the brain is paying attention to outside of consciousness? Or is non-conscious attention ruled out by definition?
I think “attributes an experience of X to itself” is being used to mean “is conscious of experiencing.” Stated this way, the role of attention doesn’t seem to be either tautological or necessarily a product of selection fallacy. As you pointed out, brains do pay attention to things that are not consciously experienced, so I think this is why the original said ‘usually’ rather than ‘always’.
He is explaining why we talk about having conscious experience, while ignoring conscious experience itself.
Do you not agree that any explanation that is sufficient to explain why we talk about consciousness necessarily entails an explanation of consciousness itself? Otherwise, it seems you’d have to believe the cause of us talking about conscious experience is something entirely unrelated to our actual conscious experience.
Do you not agree that any explanation that is sufficient to explain why we talk about consciousness necessarily entails an explanation of consciousness itself?
Sort of—only on the rather trivial grounds that if talk of conscious experience is caused by conscious experience, then an explanation of the talk must explain how it is caused by conscious experience, and for the explanation to go beyond the assertion that it is so caused, it must contain some sort of explanation of consciousness.
But Graziano’s explanation is not of this nature. He explains talk of conscious experience by the existence of models within the brain. One cannot argue that because this is an explanation of the talk, it must be an explanation of consciousness; it may just be a wrong explanation of the talk.
I think “attributes an experience of X to itself” is being used to mean “is conscious of experiencing.” Stated this way, the role of attention doesn’t seem to be either tautological or necessarily a product of selection fallacy. As you pointed out, brains do pay attention to things that are not consciously experienced, so I think this is why the original said ‘usually’ rather than ‘always’.
Do you not agree that any explanation that is sufficient to explain why we talk about consciousness necessarily entails an explanation of consciousness itself? Otherwise, it seems you’d have to believe the cause of us talking about conscious experience is something entirely unrelated to our actual conscious experience.
Sort of—only on the rather trivial grounds that if talk of conscious experience is caused by conscious experience, then an explanation of the talk must explain how it is caused by conscious experience, and for the explanation to go beyond the assertion that it is so caused, it must contain some sort of explanation of consciousness.
But Graziano’s explanation is not of this nature. He explains talk of conscious experience by the existence of models within the brain. One cannot argue that because this is an explanation of the talk, it must be an explanation of consciousness; it may just be a wrong explanation of the talk.
Fair enough.