It’s the relations between the parts which are crucial to this argument, not the parts in themselves. I’m saying that at the level of experience the relations between the parts are not spatial. This discussion becomes unfortunately complicated because so much of conscious experience takes place in subjective space. A genuine monadologist could invert my original statement and say that space only exists inside monads, with the external connections between monads being causal rather than spatial.
But let’s go back to the beginning. I have my conscious experience of the world, which is some complicated mixture of sensations, diverse conceptual positing of objects and situations, and private intentionality (thinking, willing, remembering, etc). This is all always there, and then on top of that I can be intermittently aware of particular parts or aspects of it (attention). And I’d better not leave myself out of this list of ingredients: there is a sense that someone or some entity is the entity that thinks, wills, attends.
Then, I have my physical model of the world, which might be atoms in space, or amplitudes in configuration space, and I seek to identify the experience above with some subset of the posited physical world. On both sides of the equation we have things in relation to each other, so we need a mapping not just between things but between relations. In fact, if it’s going to be an identity theory, and not just property dualism, we don’t just want a mapping, we want to be able to say that the things and relations on one side are exactly the same things and relations appearing on the other side.
So my proposition is that it is extremely problematic to identify the constituting relations of consciousness—the relations between its parts at the level of experience—with spatial relations. The constituting relations of consciousness are something like: subjective spatiality, subjective simultaneity, gestalt unification of sensations into a sensory form, conceptual association of posited properties with sensory gestalts, logical and other conjunctions of things as the compound objects of thoughts, attention to an object of thought under a particular propositional attitude, presence of all this to the observer-self—and that’s bound to be an incomplete list.
If we were going to say that consciousness consists of things in strictly spatial relations to each other, then every one of those relationship types would have to be identical with a particular spatial relationship. Now as kpreid has pointed out, things in space can have other sorts of relations to each other, such as causal relationships. So the opportunities for a spatial reductionist are a little broader, but not inspiringly so.
However, if we turn to the quantum option, and specifically entanglement: a quantum state—conceived abstractly, rather than in terms of amplitudes over configurations—is something of a black box. All the physics is telling us is that these states have certain causal relationships to each other, but nothing about their intrinsic qualities. So the idea is to use the manifest nature of consciousness, that which can be seen at the level of appearances, as a clue to what’s actually inside one of those black boxes. It’s not that quantum physics looks especially more like consciousness than classical physics; it is that classical physics does not look like consciousness, and quantum physics looks like nothing. So instead I want to see if there’s a perspective from which consciousness looks like quantum physics, e.g., like a big quantum tensor factor from an entangled physical brain.
Brain functional MRI scans show that, to the best available resolution, conscious states are highly correlated with events in space.
The brain operates by electrical and chemical signals, so a complex circuit seems like a better physics-based model of consciousness than what you propose.
How in the world do you know that? Can’t those parts just correspond to parts of the brain?
It’s the relations between the parts which are crucial to this argument, not the parts in themselves. I’m saying that at the level of experience the relations between the parts are not spatial. This discussion becomes unfortunately complicated because so much of conscious experience takes place in subjective space. A genuine monadologist could invert my original statement and say that space only exists inside monads, with the external connections between monads being causal rather than spatial.
But let’s go back to the beginning. I have my conscious experience of the world, which is some complicated mixture of sensations, diverse conceptual positing of objects and situations, and private intentionality (thinking, willing, remembering, etc). This is all always there, and then on top of that I can be intermittently aware of particular parts or aspects of it (attention). And I’d better not leave myself out of this list of ingredients: there is a sense that someone or some entity is the entity that thinks, wills, attends.
Then, I have my physical model of the world, which might be atoms in space, or amplitudes in configuration space, and I seek to identify the experience above with some subset of the posited physical world. On both sides of the equation we have things in relation to each other, so we need a mapping not just between things but between relations. In fact, if it’s going to be an identity theory, and not just property dualism, we don’t just want a mapping, we want to be able to say that the things and relations on one side are exactly the same things and relations appearing on the other side.
So my proposition is that it is extremely problematic to identify the constituting relations of consciousness—the relations between its parts at the level of experience—with spatial relations. The constituting relations of consciousness are something like: subjective spatiality, subjective simultaneity, gestalt unification of sensations into a sensory form, conceptual association of posited properties with sensory gestalts, logical and other conjunctions of things as the compound objects of thoughts, attention to an object of thought under a particular propositional attitude, presence of all this to the observer-self—and that’s bound to be an incomplete list.
If we were going to say that consciousness consists of things in strictly spatial relations to each other, then every one of those relationship types would have to be identical with a particular spatial relationship. Now as kpreid has pointed out, things in space can have other sorts of relations to each other, such as causal relationships. So the opportunities for a spatial reductionist are a little broader, but not inspiringly so.
However, if we turn to the quantum option, and specifically entanglement: a quantum state—conceived abstractly, rather than in terms of amplitudes over configurations—is something of a black box. All the physics is telling us is that these states have certain causal relationships to each other, but nothing about their intrinsic qualities. So the idea is to use the manifest nature of consciousness, that which can be seen at the level of appearances, as a clue to what’s actually inside one of those black boxes. It’s not that quantum physics looks especially more like consciousness than classical physics; it is that classical physics does not look like consciousness, and quantum physics looks like nothing. So instead I want to see if there’s a perspective from which consciousness looks like quantum physics, e.g., like a big quantum tensor factor from an entangled physical brain.
Brain functional MRI scans show that, to the best available resolution, conscious states are highly correlated with events in space.
The brain operates by electrical and chemical signals, so a complex circuit seems like a better physics-based model of consciousness than what you propose.