Between link-sharing sites like this one, print and digital publications, and never ending ad campaigns masquerading as blogs and "relate-to-me!" emails, most of us are inundated with the specious ideas and arguments of people whose reliability can be difficult to assess. A simple heuristic is stop reading if the author appears to not be grounded in the empirical tradition. Which, unfortunately, most writers aren't.
Not all valuable perspectives follows some strictly logical path to get to it's conclusions. And not all conclusions make high claims of validity. Some are just exploring potentials.
Newton was right about many things but wrong about others.
That doesn't mean his contributions aren't valuable. Imagine reading him today efter relativity and QM and then applying this approach.
There's an enormous quantity of correct, novel and insightful content. So I filter harshly and don't bother with it.
Title of the article led me to believe that it would be a essay about what the present generation of researchers of consciousness are doing differently than previous generations. That I would be presented with a new strategy to attack the problem of consciousness.
I personally don't believe there is a "problem of consciousness". But I still was willing to give the article a chance.
I became dubious when I read
> for while any spectrometer can register blue precisely on a dial, few of us would say that it is conscious. A spectrometer does not perceive blue.
Already the author is starting to set up a contrast between inanimate systems and animate ones. Which I reject. A complicated response to stimulus isn't a different thing from a response which is simple to causally explain.
Eventually I read
>physicalism contains a logical flaw ... something more is needed, beyond the laws of nature, to account for conscious subjective experience
And I stopped because I don't agree and have no need to read the inferior versions arguments for dualism when I've already reject the better versions.
I am not just looking for correct, if i wanted that I would read scientific papers. I am looking for perspectives. Things that are useful even if they don't live up to scientific scrutiny.
Might be just me, but being that this article in total is not about a scientific understanding of the color blue but rather about consciousness, it seems reasonable to me to read on.
In other words it might be a wrong scientific claim right there (I don't know enough about Maxwells equation) but that doesn't mean that it's damaging the rest of the article since it's not a scientific point that it's trying to make but a philosophical one.
I am not saying it's ok to be sloppy or wrong just that sometimes right conclusions and useful perspectives can happen even though some of the details are wrong.
It's not a scientific paper and as far as I read it shouldn't be read as such IMO.
But each to their own of course.