[troad]

I enjoyed the article - kudos to the author - but I got stuck on this too.

There is nothing inconsistent about the position that the biochemical operation brain is the sole cause of consciousness (epiphenomenalism), and the capacity of the brain to observe consciousness. In technical terms, imagine a program that creates a private file and writes some contents to it. The fact that same program subsequently reads the file - maybe even branches on its contents - is in no way a refutation of the fact that the file is epiphenomenal to the program.

I'm a very receptive audience to a refutation of epiphenomenalism, but this one isn't clicking for me.

Where the author did lose me though, is the subsequent discussion of pain, and the further discussion of value. These are much deeper topics which require a slower and more deliberate treatment, and I felt like they were being handwaved away with some unjustified assumptions. Why is pain irreducible to neural activity? In what way and for what reason are pain and pleasure dependent on consciousness? What does it mean for a thing to 'matter', and why can things not matter irrespective of one's conscious experience? If an unconscious coma patient is caused great pain, does that not 'matter'? What does it mean to 'confer significance' on something? Why is that the exclusive preserve of consciousness? Does an AI bot playing a video game also not 'confer significance' on threats it is programmed to avoid?

[armitron]

Prompted on your reply, I finished reading the article. It seems like the author is arguing from false premises in that he's desperately trying to come up with a justification for consciousness that is not tied to epiphenomenalism (I laughed out loud at the Nobel prize bit).

Since science can't do that, enter his hunches and intuitive "feelings" which are nothing but wishful thinking for a universe where consciousness matters (to whom?). I feel that one could find his "what I had been missing" finale in any number of new-age self-help books.