Giving Up on Consciousness as the Ghost in the Machine
Frontiers in Psychology April 30, 2021 P. Halligan, D. Oakley
Consciousness, the private subjective experience of being aware of thoughts, feelings, and actions, is often intuitively seen as the controller of human behavior. However, cognitive neuroscience over the past 30 years suggests that executive functions typically attributed to consciousness are actually carried out by fast, efficient non-conscious brain systems outside awareness. The authors argue that subjective awareness lacks causal influence and is merely the experience of being aware, not an agent that generates or controls actions. They propose that a scientific account of human psychology should be based on the biophysical causal dependency of prior neural processes, recognizing that most brain processes occur without any discernible change in subjective awareness.