A Cognitive Illusion: A Review and Critique of Michael Shermer’s Chapter 9 in Truth

By Marc Desmarais

Chapter 9, “The Truth About Consciousness,” stands out as one of the strongest sections of Michael Shermer’s book, Truth. His defense of scientific realism against mystical idealism, his rejection of circular arguments from subjective experience, and his extensive review of neuroscientific data all make for an excellent, grounding discussion. Ironically, however, Shermer’s own compiled evidence supports a stronger, more parsimonious conclusion than the one he ultimately draws.

1. The Mind is Brain in Action [Type Identity]

Throughout the chapter, Shermer consistently describes the brain as “giving rise to” consciousness or “producing” subjective experiences. This wording unintentionally preserves the very conceptual dualism that creates the “Hard Problem” in the first place. The evidence presented — that brain lesions eliminate mental capacities, electrical stimulation creates experiences, and neuroscientists can predict human choices from brain scans before a subject is consciously aware of them — demonstrates something much more profound. It points to the reality that everything is physical [physicalist monism]: the view that the mind is entirely identical to the operation of the living biochemical brain.

This identity view does not require identifying every neural circuit involved in consciousness. Science routinely establishes biological and chemical identities long before every structural implementation detail is fully understood:

· Water is H2O: We established this identity long before the invention of electron microscopes capable of imaging individual chemical bonds.

· Temperature is Mean Kinetic Energy: Just as thermodynamics could declare that macroscopic warmth is molecular motion without tracking the velocity of every single atom in a room, neurobiology can establish that consciousness is biochemistry.

The current lack of a complete neural map is an engineering gap for future science to close, not a baseline philosophical mystery requiring non-physical explanations. Consciousness is not “produced” by brain activity; it is a specific class of organized brain activity.

2. The Illusion of “Understanding” [The Known Unknowable]

Shermer categorizes the Hard Problem as a “known unknowable” because, as he argues, it would supposedly “violate Aristotle’s law of identity — A is A. You cannot at one and the same time be one thing (a human) and another thing (a dolphin)”. From this premise, he concludes that “understanding how the brain machinery works is different from experiencing the brain machinery itself.” While this underlying premise is technically true, it does not justify his conclusion.

It is an absolute reality that gaining a scientific, mechanistic understanding of the brain will bear zero physical or qualitative resemblance to the act of “being” that brain — of thinking, perceiving, or being served up confabulations by the subconscious. However, a scientific description of a physical system is never supposed to replicate the subjective execution of that system. The sensation of “red” is fundamentally a biological response to light of a specific wavelength hitting the retina. At an operational level, it functions to create relational contrast so an organism can differentiate inputs. But because we evolved with red blood and blue skies, colors carry deeply embedded evolutionary biases. Red is never a calming color because it is an evolutionary sign of physiological threat, bleeding, or opportunity. The qualitative experience of “redness” is this entire integrated neurobiological process — the sensory contrast combined with the hardwired autonomic priming and affective shifts.

By labeling consciousness a “known unknowable” simply because an fMRI scan or a neural map does not “feel” like the qualitative splash of “redness,” Shermer smuggles a romantic, unscientific definition of “understanding” into his thesis. Traditional philosophy treats understanding as an affective, intuitive state — that pleasant, biochemical “lightbulb” sensation that says, “Now I get it.”

But scientific realism does not rely on subjective intuition; it relies on empirical constraint. To a scientist, understanding a physical system means mapping its cause-and-effect mechanisms, predicting its behavior, and successfully intervening when it breaks. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.

The human brain relies on simplified, metabolically cheap self-models that completely lack operational access to its own underlying biochemical calculations. To demand that our consciousness intuitively simulate its own physical hardware is an architectural impossibility — an infinite regress analogous to demanding that memory visually inspect the chemical mechanism of remembering. The divergence between a physical map and a lived experience is not a profound metaphysical wall; it is simply a feature of reality.

Shermer’s inclusion of Christof Koch’s psychedelic reversal on 5-MeO-DMT illustrates how easily we lose sight of this architectural boundary. When a powerful psychoactive molecule disrupts the brain’s neural networks, it temporarily destabilizes the internal self-model, causing a profound feeling of ego-dissolution. Ironically, Koch — a lifelong neuroscientist — mistook this altered execution of his neural hardware for a metaphysical discovery, abruptly concluding that primacy goes to consciousness rather than the objective world. He allowed an altered intuitive state to override his own empirical data. It is a reminder that the conscious “interpreter” is entirely blind to its own biochemical machinery; when the underlying hardware is altered chemically, the interpreter simply invents a more mystical confabulation to explain the experience.

3. The Physical Determinism & Operational Limits Thesis

This architectural blindness directly undercuts Shermer’s defense of a “compatibilist” version of free will later in the book. If the mind is identical to the brain in action, human choices are strictly physically determined biochemical processes that never violate the laws of physics. However, these choices are practically impossible to predict or accurately track in real time, for two distinct physical reasons:

· The External Limit (Predicting Others): To predict another person’s choice in advance, an external observer would need real-time, atom-by-atom access to the entire physical state, environmental inputs, and neural history of that target brain. This is a data-collection impossibility.

· The Internal Limit (Explaining Ourselves): A brain does not spend precious metabolic energy predicting its own future choices; it simply processes inputs to execute a decision.

When the conscious mind attempts to introspect and explain a choice after the fact, it consistently fails. As demonstrated by Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain research, the brain’s verbal “interpreter” routinely constructs coherent, subjectively compelling explanations for behaviors whose true causes lie entirely outside its awareness. Because consciousness does not have operational access to the massive, subconscious biochemical networks driving behavior, it “confabulates” — it invents a plausible story to justify the action after it has already occurred.

Therefore, traditional compatibilist arguments for free will must be rejected as unscientific oversimplifications. Just because a biological machine is too computationally limited to predict its own next move, or too deep to introspectively map its own subconscious processing, does not mean it is “free” from physical cause and effect. The feeling of free will is merely a retroactive narrative created by a conscious press secretary that is entirely blind to the deterministic machinery driving it.

Conclusion

The “Hard Problem” survives not because science has discovered a profound metaphysical mystery, but because our evolved cognitive architecture encourages us to mistake the limitations of introspection for the limitations of science. The problem is what happens when an incomplete self-model mistakes its own representational limits for features of reality. Rather than simply declaring the Hard Problem wrong, we must realize a naturalistic explanation for why intelligent people repeatedly invent it despite overwhelming neuroscientific evidence that the mind is simply what the brain does.

Epilogue: On the Nature of “Understanding”

Ultimately, the divergence between the physicalist conclusions of this review and Shermer’s “known unknowable” categorization stems from a fundamental disagreement over what it actually means to “understand” a system. To traditional philosophy, understanding is treated as an affective or emotional state — that satisfying, biochemical “lightbulb” sensation that signals intuitive clarity. In the real world of engineering and science, however, relying on this subjective feeling is a profound epistemic risk. Humans, including engineers, routinely fall prey to self-deception, pretending to understand a mechanism to avoid the intense metabolic tax and rigorous labor required to truly trace its failure modes.

While a human brain can credibly map a localized mechanical mechanism, a single biological brain is structurally incapable of “understanding” its own internal operations. True understanding is not an individual emotional state; it is a system-level property. It is the emergent output of a distributed network that bridges biological brains with strict methodological error-correction (the scientific method), externalized instrumentation (fMRIs, EEGs, microscopes), a cumulative multi-generational database, and scalable analytical tools like machine learning and AI.

If this entire integrated system can successfully predict, manipulate, and repair the physical machinery of the brain, then the system understands it — regardless of whether any individual human “feels” like they do. True scientific understanding is never a static, internal flash of intuition, but a dynamic, heavily constrained approximation of truth refined over time through systemic effort.

It’s the system that does the understanding