Thinking about the material basis of consciousness brings us back, once again, to the hard problem. The beast machine theory accelerates the dissolution of this apparent mystery. By extending the controlled hallucination view to the very deepest layers of selfhood, by revealing the experience of the-self-as-really-existing as one more aspect of perceptual inference, the intuitions on which the hard problem implicitly rest are eroded even further. In particular, the hard-problem-friendly intuition that the conscious self is somehow apart from the rest of nature – a really-existing immaterial
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