Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience

by Michael S.A. Graziano

I like to imagine a group of Cro-Magnon men and women sitting around a campfire at night some 30,000 years ago. One of them tells a story about an alien future. Their world will be leveled, the forests cut, the wilderness covered with artificial stones smothering the ground and stacked into giant square caves that block out the sky. The magnificent animals they hunt and paint on their walls will all be dead—the aurochs, the mammoths, the cave bears. The spiritual lifestyle of the hunter will be gone. Almost nobody will know how to make good spears or arrows or anything else with their own hands. Most people will sit inside, in dim light, pressing little clicking squares on a rectangular plate all day long, their bodies turning soft and slow. The air will be choked with human-made fumes, the outdoors roaring with a stupendous and continuous human-made din. I imagine the rest of the clan pulling faces and condemning this dystopian picture. And yet here we are, and we don’t mind it.