A few comments from a v. confused 'observer': Have we 'explained' consciousness with a description of it in terms of qm? Yes, if description = explanation. Which apparently is the case since Galileo.
Some scientists argue that an explanation provides a generative mechanism that would produce the phenomenon that is to be explained. But if there is a kind of proto-subjectivity all the way down, one cannot posit a generative mechanism anymore than one can explain why there is something rather than nothing?
As has been noted in recent posts there is a _metaphysical_ assumption in assuming that there is a purely physical basis from which subjectivity (and eventually s. consc.) would 'emerge' or be generated. Why is this assumption made? (Whitehead, Leibniz, Amit Goswani, Spinoza, Deleuze, to pick just a few dilettantes, don't make it) - are/were they "soft in the head" or "ageing hippies"?
Gordon Globus:
One more extremity: "Inside the head"..."inside the brain," these observables, too, are generated by someone's brain. If I perceive my own brain through a window in my skull, my own brain is inside my own brain... What Borgesian vertigo! ("The Circular Ruins.")
Raymond Ruyer's discusses this idea in 'Paradoxes de la Conscience et limites de Automatisme', (Paris: Albin Michel, 1966, p69-70). Ruyer gives the example of a man with a perspex cranium (which Ruyer adapts from S.C. Pepper, Dimensions of the mind). What we see is 'in' our heads without projection. Kohler understood this.
Ruyer also discusses microphysics: "What seems shocking in materialistic theses which affirm that 'matter can think' is that they appear to pose a magical relation btwn 'thought' and 'matter' - matter being understood as a material substance. But if we substituted for 'matter' a 'unitary domain of space-time' and if one said 'a unitary domain of space-time can be conscious' - there would no longer be recourse to a magical union, but rather a faithful account of a fundamental phenomenon".
The old opposition btwn matter/mind disappears with the shift of perception that there is a micropsychical domain that -is- the microphysical. Our problem is finding the vocabulary and concepts to express this: autopossession, self-enjoyment, primary consciousness, subjectless subjectivity, emotional intensity. 'There is more to being than thinking.' (Felix Guattari).
Gordon:
The "brain"--the real one, not the phenomenal one--is a quantum clearing where worlds are continually disclosed. The rest is quantum-night...
It doesn't seem so dark for Castenada when you fly on the wings of intent.
Paul.
"Let's dare to say it again and again: there is nothing surprising in the phenomenon of thought, or at least nothing that proves that thought is distinct from matter, nothing that shows that matter, refined or modified in some way, can't produce thought." Sade, Histoire de Juliette.
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