“The idea that brains ‘produce’ consciousness or that mutations ‘produce’ evolution is like the idea that a hat internally generates a rabbit or that a mirror internally generates an image. People might believe that a hat internally generates a rabbit because they see a rabbit emerge from a hat, but they assume that there must be a mechanism inside the hat that produces rabbits. We tend to think in terms of containers. When something appears in a certain place, we often assume that it was ‘made’ there. Someone who cracks open a skull to find the source of consciousness is as reasonable as someone who, after seeing a magician pull a rabbit from a hat, starts dissecting the hat to find a rabbit-assembling mechanism. This container fallacy leads to the belief that if consciousness appears in the brain, the brain must have generated it, just as one might assume that a mirror, by virtue of being the place where an image appeared, must contain an image-assembling mechanism that produced it in the first place. Cracking open a skull to find the source of consciousness is as misguided as cracking open a radio to find the voices inside. Believing that brains ‘produce’ consciousness or that mutations ‘produce’ evolution is like believing that a mirror produces the image within it and proceeding to smash the mirror to figure out where the image came from. If you break the mirror, the image disappears, but this does not mean that the image was ‘inside’ the mirror. Likewise, if the brain is damaged, consciousness may change or cease, but this does not mean that the brain produced it in the first place.”

— an anonymous informant (TD)