Color isn’t out there; but how can it be “in here”, if the brain also just consists of particles in space? And color is either somewhere, or it’s nowhere. Dennett takes the “nowhere” option, as part of his general denial of a “Cartesian theater”, a place where appearances happen.
Except for those who think mental states can supervene directly on processes extending far outside the physical body, I think most scientifically minded people suppose that the world of appearance is somehow identical with something inside the brain: that (in one sense) what you see is in your visual cortex, even if (in another sense) what you see is far away. (Though they may prefer to say that it’s the seeing that is in the cortex, rather than what is seen.) As I have just argued, this does not resolve the problem of locating perceived color (etc) in the physical world, it merely localizes the problem. We still await the identification of some physical thing or property in the brain which can plausibly be identified with an actual instance of color. And I think that’s hopeless so long as you restrict yourself to states built up from fuzzy mesoscopic properties like membrane polarizations. The ghost of a homogeneous shade of color has to somehow hover over something which in actual fact consists of large numbers of ions on either side of a big macromolecule.
So I look for the true Cartesian theater to be found at a level where physically, even a ‘particle’ is just an approximation, such as in a decomposition of a global quantum state into what formally just appear to be algebraic structures lacking even a spatial interpretation. Quantum theory actually permits such an abstract perspective, if you step away from the use of a particular basis, such as configuration. I think that here, and only here, out of all the physics we know and half-know, is there something removed enough from spatializing presuppositions that it might be identifiable directly with a state of consciousness. This has the empirical consequence that there had better be a distributed quantum condensate (or other locus of entanglement) somewhere in the brain, causally situated so as to function as a Cartesian theater and locus of consciousness. All I’m doing is displacing the hard problem onto the properties and structures of that hypothesized quantum object, but it had to be done because the problem appears to be unsolvable out in the world of disentangled ‘individual particles’.
Color isn’t out there; but how can it be “in here”, if the brain also just consists of particles in space? And color is either somewhere, or it’s nowhere. Dennett takes the “nowhere” option, as part of his general denial of a “Cartesian theater”, a place where appearances happen.
Except for those who think mental states can supervene directly on processes extending far outside the physical body, I think most scientifically minded people suppose that the world of appearance is somehow identical with something inside the brain: that (in one sense) what you see is in your visual cortex, even if (in another sense) what you see is far away. (Though they may prefer to say that it’s the seeing that is in the cortex, rather than what is seen.) As I have just argued, this does not resolve the problem of locating perceived color (etc) in the physical world, it merely localizes the problem. We still await the identification of some physical thing or property in the brain which can plausibly be identified with an actual instance of color. And I think that’s hopeless so long as you restrict yourself to states built up from fuzzy mesoscopic properties like membrane polarizations. The ghost of a homogeneous shade of color has to somehow hover over something which in actual fact consists of large numbers of ions on either side of a big macromolecule.
So I look for the true Cartesian theater to be found at a level where physically, even a ‘particle’ is just an approximation, such as in a decomposition of a global quantum state into what formally just appear to be algebraic structures lacking even a spatial interpretation. Quantum theory actually permits such an abstract perspective, if you step away from the use of a particular basis, such as configuration. I think that here, and only here, out of all the physics we know and half-know, is there something removed enough from spatializing presuppositions that it might be identifiable directly with a state of consciousness. This has the empirical consequence that there had better be a distributed quantum condensate (or other locus of entanglement) somewhere in the brain, causally situated so as to function as a Cartesian theater and locus of consciousness. All I’m doing is displacing the hard problem onto the properties and structures of that hypothesized quantum object, but it had to be done because the problem appears to be unsolvable out in the world of disentangled ‘individual particles’.