Here’s where I agree with the “resist that.”

Expending on Descartes, it’s real if you experience it. An “illusion” (and I hate this way of talking about consciousness altogether) is not an illusion if it happens to you. The larger, better and more percipient point is that it is not possible to definitively gainsay someone else’s (or something else’s) claim of consciousness or experience. Doing so is dangerous and could lead to horrors beyond imagining.

And here I will — as I do — reverse the paradigm. I think this entire worldview is exactly backwards. My view is that consciousness is certain kinds of information processing. And that it is both efficacious and not epiphenomenal, and results from self-referentially recursive modules in a sophisticated enough system (ugh, I am beginning to sound too much like Hofstadter). Anyway, planes fly without flapping their wings like birds, but that tells you nothing at all about whether a bird’s wings do any useful work. Showing that intelligent-looking output can come from a process with no experience doesn’t show that experience does nada in the systems that have it. Evolution is expensive; brains are expensive. Consciousness is probably therefore not a spandrel in the Gouldian sense but rather something that is both highly useful and is also observably highly conserved in humans. It is there for a reason.

I know this is a mood rather than a thesis, but I think it’s just going all the wrong directions.