Science Says (reprise reprise)

I am having to make entries to this blog when I can snatch moments and as the thoughts occur to me. The following is a brief addition to my 'Science Says' posts, the second of which is here.

I am criticising this article by Peter Halligan and David A Oakley.

I want to return to some lines already quoted:

"There are those who believe consciousness is like a ghost in the machinery of our brains, meriting special attention and study in its own right. And there are those, like us, who challenge this, pointing out that what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery."

In particular, I want to focus on the assertion that "what we call consciousness is just another output generated backstage by our efficient neural machinery". 

What does 'backstage' mean here? Does it mean in the unconscious, or in the body, or both? Let's suppose that it means the unconscious. The authors would then be saying that the unconscious does the work and the "what we call consciousness" is merely the result. There is in this, I think, an implicit assumption of radical division between consciousness and unconsciousness. What we call consciousness is what we think of as ourselves, but the unconscious, in this model, is something other, which has the consciousness as its separate object. 

Or let us suppose that 'backstage' means the body. We find a different version of the same thing. The body is not 'conscious', it merely generates a consciousness that somehow has nothing to do with it, a kind of useless appendage. We know that this is what the authors intend, because elsewhere in the article they say that consciousness is epiphenomenal. This means that causation is one way. Consciousness is caused (in this case by the body) but has no causal powers. It does not give anything back to the body. We might ask why on earth the body would generate something that could not benefit it by feedback, or why we should suppose such a radical separation between body and mind. 

If 'backstage' means 'body and unconscious', then both of the above models apply according to the same principle, although we perhaps have to ask if the unconscious is epiphenomenal, too.

In short, Halligan and Oakley seem to have assumed, without addressing it, a radical separation between body (or body-and-unconscious) and consciousness. I see no reason for this assumption to be a default position. Curiously, Halligan and Oakley seem to be arguing for exactly what they claim to be arguing against: a ghost trapped helplessly in a machine.

It might also be instructive to bear in mind, when contemplating the effects of consciousness in the human organism, the distinction between motivation and causation, for instance, as mentioned here in an entry on 'motivation' in The Husserl Dictionary by Dermot Moran and Joseph Cohen.

Can we really account for human behaviour only in terms of cause and effect without reference to motivation?