Yes: I feel pretty sure that anyone reading this is indeed conscious. However, the NYT recently ran a short piece from Michael S. A. Graziano which apparently questioned it. A fuller account of his thinking is in this paper from 2011; the same ideas were developed at greater length in his book Consciousness and the Social Brain
I think the startling headline on the NYT piece misrepresents Graziano somewhat. The core of his theory is that awareness is in some sense a delusion, the reality of which is simple attention. We have ways of recognising the attention of other organisms, and what it is fixed on (the practical value of that skill in environments where human beings may be either hunters or hunted is obvious): awareness is just our garbled version of attention. he offers the analogy of colour. The reality out there is different wavelengths of light: colour, our version of that, is a slightly messed-up, neatened, artificial version which is nevertheless very vivid to us in spite of being artificial to a remarkably large extent.
I don’t think Graziano is even denying that awareness exists, in some sense: as a phenomenon of some kind it surely does: what he means is more that it isn’t veridical: what it tells us about itself, and what it tells us about attention, isn’t really true. As he acknowledges in the paper, there are labelling issues here, and I believe it would be possible to agree with the substance of what he says while recasting it in terms that look superficially much more conventional.
Another labelling issue may lurk around the concept of attention. On some accounts, it actually presupposes consciousness: to direct one’s attention towards something is precisely to bring it to the centre of your consciousness. That clearly isn’t what Graziano means: he has in mind a much more basic meaning. Attention for him is something simple like having your sensory organs locked on to a particular target. This needs to be clear and unambiguous, because otherwise we can immediately see potential problems over having to concede that cameras or other simple machines are capable of attention; but I’m happy to concede that we could probably put together some kind of criterion, perhaps neurological, that would fit the bill well enough and give Graziano the unproblematic materialist conception of attention that he needs.
All that looks reasonably OK as applied to other people, but Graziano wants the same system to supply our own mistaken impression of awareness. Just as we track the attention of others with the false surrogate of awareness, we pick up our own attentive states and make the same kind of mistake. This seems odd: when I sense my own awareness of something, it doesn’t feel like a deduction I’ve made from objective evidence about my own behaviour: I just sense it. I think Graziano actually wants it to be like that for other people too. He isn’t talking about rational, Sherlock Holmes style reasoning about the awareness of other people, he has in mind something like a deep, old, lizard-brain kind of thing; like the sense of somebody there that makes the hairs rise on the back of the neck and your eyes quickly saccade towards the presumed person.
That is quite a useful insight, because what Graziano is concerned to deny is the reality of subjective experience, of qualia, in a word. To do so he needs to be able to explain why awareness seems so special when the reality is nothing more than information processing. I think this remains a weak spot in the theory, but the idea that it comes from a very basic system whose whole function is to generate a feeling of ‘something there’ helps quite a bit, and is at least moderately compatible with my own intuitions and introspections.What Graziano really relies on is the suggestion that awareness is a second-order matter: it’s a cognitive state about other cognitive states, something we attribute to ourselves and not, as it seems to be, directly about the real world. It just happens to be a somewhat mistaken cognitive state.
That still leaves us in some difficulty over the difference between me and other people. If my sense of my own awareness is generated in exactly the same way as my sense of the awareness of others, it ought to seem equally distant – but it doesn’t, it seems markedly more present and far less deniable.
More fundamentally, I still don’t really see why my attention should be misperceived. In the case of colours, the misrepresentation of reality comes from two sources, I think. One is the inadequacy of our eyes; our brain has to make do with very limited data on colour (and on distance and other factors) and so has to do things like hypothesising yellow light where it should be recognising both red and green, for example. Second, the brain wants to make it simple for us and so tries desperately to ensure that the same objects always look the same colour, although the wavelengths being received actually vary according to conditions. I find it hard to see what comparable difficulties affect our perception of attention. Why doesn’t it just seem like attention? Graziano’s view of it as a second-order matter explains how it can be wrong about attention, but not really why.
So I think the theory is less radical than it seems, and doesn’t quite nail the matter on some important points: but it does make certain kinds of sense and at the very least helps keep us roused from our dogmatic slumbers. Here’s a wild thought inspired (but certainly not endorsed) by Graziano. Suppose our sense of qualia really does come from a kind of primitive attention-detecting module. It detects our own attention and supplies that qualic feel, but since it also (in fact primarily) detects other people’s attention, should it not also provide a bit of a qualic feel for other people too? Normally when we think of our beliefs about other people, we remain in the explicit, higher realms of cognition: but what if we stay at a sort of visceral level, what if we stick with that hair-on-the back-of the-neck sensation? Could it be that now and then we get a whiff of other people’s qualia? Surely too heterodox an idea to contemplate…