The considerations I have raised in this essay are not new, but perhaps bringing them together as I have done will help show that a counter-intuitive theory like mine still has an advantage over some of the fantasies in which philosophers have recently indulged. It may well be, as Paul Bloom (2004) has suggested, that we are all “natural born dualists,” but just as eyeglasses can correct for myopia, natural-born or not, so science can correct for this innate cognitive disability. Intuitions to the contrary are important data, but should not be taken to indicate a limitation of science, as some have thought. In fact, if the best scientific theory of consciousness turns out not to be deeply counterintuitive at first, among the data it will have had to explain is why it took us so long to arrive at it.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Michael Cohen, and to Andy Clark, and the rest of Dmitry Volkoff’s Greenland Consciousness and Free Will workshop (June 10-17, 2014), for editorial advice on this essay.