I also think it’s just obvious, once you allow yourself to notice, that the physics we have does not even contain the everyday phenomenon of color, so something has to change.
You feel comfortable with throwing about hilbert spaces, monodologies, d0-branes and tensor products but not comfortable with a physics which represents colour in terms of the interaction between photons of various wavelengths, a few types of receptors in the eyes and a brain. Mind boggling.
About a dozen separate instances of handwaving need to be turned into concrete propositions before it has produced an actual theory.
Once produced, such a theory would be something other than physics and will hopefully be isolated to philosophy departments where it can do minimal harm.
The formal revisions to physics that I propose do not in themselves reintroduce color (or any other aspect of consciousness) into the real. But they are meant to make it possible, and the key move is to identify the thing that is conscious with a sharply defined entity in the physics, the monad. At present, computational neuroscience revolves around coarse-grained computational states of physical aggregates whose boundaries are vague from a fundamental perspective. (Under exactly what conditions does a wandering electron count as part of a neuron that it’s passing through? Etc. And yet conscious states are supposed to be identified with computational states of neurons.) Once you have sharp boundaries, you still have to deal with the formal mismatch between physical properties and phenomenal properties, but I think that’s doable. But if you can’t even be precise about whether there’s a conscious entity there, and how many of them there are, then you cannot even get started.
You feel comfortable with throwing about hilbert spaces, monodologies, d0-branes and tensor products but not comfortable with a physics which represents colour in terms of the interaction between photons of various wavelengths, a few types of receptors in the eyes and a brain. Mind boggling.
Once produced, such a theory would be something other than physics and will hopefully be isolated to philosophy departments where it can do minimal harm.
Representing isn’t explaining.
The formal revisions to physics that I propose do not in themselves reintroduce color (or any other aspect of consciousness) into the real. But they are meant to make it possible, and the key move is to identify the thing that is conscious with a sharply defined entity in the physics, the monad. At present, computational neuroscience revolves around coarse-grained computational states of physical aggregates whose boundaries are vague from a fundamental perspective. (Under exactly what conditions does a wandering electron count as part of a neuron that it’s passing through? Etc. And yet conscious states are supposed to be identified with computational states of neurons.) Once you have sharp boundaries, you still have to deal with the formal mismatch between physical properties and phenomenal properties, but I think that’s doable. But if you can’t even be precise about whether there’s a conscious entity there, and how many of them there are, then you cannot even get started.
Would a rose smell more sweet if you were defined as a fundamental entity in physics?
At least it could have a smell.