Is Consciousness Nothing But a Word?
I often seek out skeptics to help me sharpen my feelings, thoughts and insights about various aspects of consciousness. Here's an article I found particularly interesting and thought you might too. eSkeptic writer and psychology professor Henry D. Schlinger writes,“Consciousness” is only a word we use to refer to sometimes quite different behavioral phenomena." In this article Schlinger has suggested that most of the time what people mean by the word is our ongoing, though mostly covert, self-talk about our own public and private stimulation and behaviors.
This account may or may not be correct, but it is parsimonious because it makes very few assumptions and appeals to observable or potentially observable relationships that are consistent with experimentally established scientific principles.
"We skeptics," he writes, "find it all too easy to fault obvious pseudosciences, but when it comes to our own messy, unscientific thinking about ourselves, we’re a lot less critical. Thus, it will probably take a lot longer to realize that the conscious inner life that so fascinates us may be nothing more than a learned repertoire of verbal (and/or imaginal) behavior than it did to realize that the earth is not flat, that it is not the center of the universe, and that life on earth was not designed by a Creator."
If you want to read the entire article it can be accessed in the attachment.
Bob
