I don't feel papers like this are really adding much to the community. Of course all explanations of consciousness go against our conventional understanding of the universe, that's why we don't understand consciousness yet. More likely than not, we just don't understand the universe as well as we thought we did. Bonus points to those who think different.
We're also viewing consciousness from WITHIN consciousness, so our views are distorted by filters that we cannot see, and thus we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
While it makes sense that our brains could be structured in such a way that some things are easier to understand than others, I think it would be remarkable that it somehow filters out our understanding of the process of consciousness in particular.
I think that particular criticism is vague and ill-formed, but oft-repeated because it sounds good. After all, having a brain hasn't stopped us from learning about the brain, even though one might think it would be hard to learn about brains with brains.
we assume that there is something fundamentally special going on, when in fact we're just viewing the system from an angle that makes it very hard to understand.
How do you know there isn't something special going on? Seems to me that believing there isn't anything special is just as much a guess as believing there is, given how little we understand consciousness.
