But you do not need to understand what I have just said to get the message. Creating something that gives the illusion of having weird and wonderful properties need be no great shakes, certainly much easier than creating something that actually has them, especially when it is possible to restrict the point of view. (If you want a demonstration of how to make an impossible triangle with paper and scissors, there is a lovely one online.5)
There is every reason to think the truth will eventually be discovered by scientific investigation. Even so, I would flag a potential difficulty in getting there. If sentition appears phenomenal only when observed from the specific first-person viewpoint, this is bound to create major difficulties for those neuroscientists who hope to find the neural correlate of consciousness (the NCC) by studying the brain from the outside. For the reality will likely be that the NCC seen from outside will strike the observer as nothing special, merely an oddity ― just as would happen if we were to come across the wooden triangle lying on a bench, without realising what it has been designed to do. Figure 4 illustrates the problem, the lack of correspondence between the third-person and first-person points of view.
The final challenge is going to be to explain the biological purpose of all this. We can surely assume that the kind of development I have sketched above will not have happened accidentally. It must be the result of natural selection favouring genes that underwrite the specialised neural circuits ― whatever they turn out to be ― that do indeed sustain the illusion of qualia, giving rise to the magical mystery show for the first-person. And it is axiomatic that this will only have happened if those lucky enough to be spectators of this show have somehow been at an advantage in terms of biological survival. Yet, how can this be, if, as is widely assumed by theorists, the phenomenal richness of consciousness is of no practical value whatsoever? Fodor has stated this aspect of the problem bluntly: “There are several reasons why consciousness is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed. What mental processes can be performed only because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? . . As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they were not conscious. Why then did God bother to make consciousness?”7)
