Consciousness is merely what one part of the brain tells the rest of the brain.
Graziano is a self-declared ‘mechanist’, like Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland and Keith Frankish. So, the hard problem is not a problem at all because the brain does not produce subjective experience. The question of something non-physical arising out of something physical simply does not arise. Rather, on Graziano’s account, there is a network in the brain that tells the rest of the brain that it has subjective experience. It’s just like perceiving anything else: your brain tells you what it perceives. An hallucination is the best example, though. A network in your brain tells you that something you are hallucinating is there and you believe it. That’s what consciousness is. That’s all that consciousness is. So, what is the point of it? His answer is that awareness or consciousness is a bundle of information that tracks attention so as to control it, maintain it and optimise it. Attention is a really important capability and a brain feature that optimises it must be a good thing.
Link to paper: https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/86794/spread/66#
You may also like to browse other philosophy posts: https://www.thesentientrobot.com/category/philosophy/
