Listening to a professor Sam Wang from Princeton talk about neurology in a Teaching Company set of lectures. He talks of one part of the brain as "interpreting" a "signal" from another part. This manner of talk is too homuncular. One needs a vocabulary that tips its hat, as it were, to human operation as the source of analogies by which we understand the processes taking place within our bodies. But that vocab must also distinguish the processes/states occurring in this or that part of the human FROM properly human operation. Perhaps one should speak of this part of the brain as "sub-interpreting" the "sub-signal" from another part? Uh, perhaps that is more distracting than illuninating (hmnmmm).
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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