(Second response to an article in ‘Nautilus’, 14th October 2020, in which David Eagleman is interviewed by Steven Paulson.)
The analogy David Eagleman uses between the brain and a radio is not original but certainly worth considering again. Eagleman’s point is this. He is trying to make sense of the relationship between the brain and consciousness. It is widely accepted that our conscious experiences are in some way related to states of the brain. It is often suggested that the brain generates consciousness, in some way produces it out of its material substance but as Eagleman implies that is not the only way of looking at the problem. This is where he brings in the radio analogy: ‘Imagine that you were a Kalahari Bushman who found a radio in the sand and you’d never seen anything like this. You notice that if you wiggle the knob, you hear voices coming out of the radio. And if you take the screws off the back, you realise that as you change any of the wires, it garbles the voices. As a radio materialist, you might come to the conclusion that somehow this arrangement of wires causes the voices to happen, but you wouldn’t even be aware that there are distant cities with radio towers. You have no way to touch or feel or even suspect the existence of electromagnetic radiation but that is where the voices are coming from. So perhaps not everything is generated by the brain. We might be tuning into consciousness somewhere else.’
But what are the implications of this analogy for our understanding of consciousness? The radio is a mechanism whereby sounds are made manifest. The radio does not produce the sounds. We know about radio stations playing music, hosting discussions and so on, so that is not a problem. But what then is the source of the consciousness equivalent to wave transmission to the radio? Where does consciousness come from?
Consciousness and Other Matters 