In Our Heads

Regarding the April 23 feature on the “new theory of what it means to be conscious” advanced by Professor Michael Graziano ’89 *96, I would like to know — and this is not a rhetorical question — whether there is an essential difference between Professor Graziano’s theory and that of La Mettrie’s L’homme machine (literally, Man machine, 1748). As for Professor Graziano’s reduction of the human understanding of God as a manner of projection that can be illustrated by the illusion that the ventriloquist’s orangutan hand puppet is actually listening and talking, I am reminded of a satirical line in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which considers “the Truth-finder” peering into “his own Mind, and being there capable of tracing no Ray of Divinity ... very fairly, honestly, and logically concludes, that no such [thing] exist[s] in the whole Creation.”