Consciousness

Kicking Philosophers to the Curb

The Hard Problem of Consciousness is a Category Error

Philosophers piled at the curb, by the author using Google Gemini

The objects of my abuse are those who stroll through the Garden of the Philosophy of Consciousness, whether academics, thinkers, amateurs, or Nobel Prize winners.

There are 325 theories of consciousness. Nearly all are wrong to some degree. No, I haven’t read them all, nor am I guilty of hubris. I am as humble as the typical Medium writer. Those that I have read fall into two categories, those that are wrong and those that are incomplete. It is possible to be neither wrong nor correct.

This article examines consciousness through the lens of the Evolutionary Origin of Consciousness. Even that statement isn’t quite right. To be precise, the physical substrate that supports consciousness evolved. The nervous system evolved. Consciousness is a process that runs on the substrate. The nervous system is the hardware. Consciousness is the software.

Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg, Israeli professors, spent 10 years writing The Sensitive Soul. They developed the theory of Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) which served as the transition marker of consciousness. UAL is long-term memory and all the neurological structures that support it. Unfortunately, they made a category error, the…