NPR Examines Consciousness

An NPR series called "The Really Big Questions" has recently examined the question, "What Can the Animal Mind Tell Us About Human Consciousness?"

The people they interviewed included neuroscientist Christof Koch, ethologist Colin Allen, primatologist Frans de Waal, and philosopher Colin McGinn. Now, who do you suppose had the most moronic things to say? Take a guess.

No surprise, it was the philosopher. Whenever scientific subjects are discussed, you can count on some philosopher to chime in with something really stupid. McGinn made all sorts of dubious unsupported claims, like "There are very strong reasons to think that reductionism is not true". He said, "I think there are problems of principle. In the very project you're trying to understand how the phenomenological might arise from the organic, because we're trying to bring together two different conceptual schemes, two different types of knowledge we have of the world, knowledge which we derive from first person awareness of our own consciousness and then the knowledge we have of the physical world, and these two types of knowledge simply don't fit together." Luckily Christof Koch was there to answer some of this kind of fuzzy thinking.

Unfortunately, the interviewer, Lynn Neary, didn't help things out. Although it should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for even a few minutes that what we call "consciousness" is multifaceted, involving things like memory, planning, anticipation, modelling of the environment, and self-awareness, it took nearly half an hour before these ideas were brought out explicitly, and even after that, Neary persisted in conflating them. She seemed to want to have some very simple definition of what consciousness is before discussing it. Is it too much to ask that interviewers do a little homework before beginning their job?

If there's any consolation, at least they didn't interview Mario Beauregard.