There is a passage in the Philosophical Investigations that philosophy of mind has not yet finished digesting. It concerns what Wittgenstein called the private language argument, and while the argument has attracted an enormous secondary literature, most of that literature debates its validity as an argument rather than attending to what it reveals. What it reveals, I want to suggest, is something that changes the terms of consciousness studies entirely.

David Chalmers gave philosophy one of its most useful formulations when he distinguished the easy problems of consciousness from the hard one. The easy problems concern function: explaining how the brain integrates information, how it discriminates stimuli, how it produces reports about internal states. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, t

Free will, as most people understand it, the libertarian variety, where the self is genuinely the ultimate author of its choices, uncaused and unconstrained, is almost certainly an illusion. The interesting question is not whether it is an illusion. The interesting question is why we invented it, what function it serves, and whether we could manage without it or whether it is load-bearing mythology.

Here's a question that makes most neuroscientists uncomfortable: What if the brain doesn't produce consciousness? What if the brain is more like a receiver or transmitter? More like a radio tuning into a signal rather than generating the music? What I'm suggesting is that the dominant assumption, that brains produce consciousness the way livers produce bile, is an assumption, not an established fact. And there's an alternative that deserves serious consideration.