Stephen Goldberg and David Wilson raise seemingly reasonable objections to my claim that the hard problem is world qualities, not mental qualia. After all, stimulate the occipital lobe and you get sight, says Goldberg, so it seems to be an internal thing. How about optical illusions and Nekker cubes, asks Wilson: "What happens to a Nekker cube when I 'flip' my perception from one cube to another? Nothing changes 'outside,' just 'inside'." The pain of a phantom limb is inside, not outside, he continues.
I did warn in my original post, which made the world problematic, that there could be "quite a wrench to common sense existence," and so it happens in answering these objections. Common sense belief in the quotidian world out there must be profoundly solicited.
I claim--Heaven and Leibniz help me, I know it sounds crazy!--that our brains are monadic and worlds appear in parallel across brain monads. Though I would update the idea: thrownness in the world is continually "unfolded" in parallel across brain monads. ("Unfolded" to be unpacked shortly.) These monads are "windowless" in the sense that they contain no images of the monad's surround, yet they are symmetry-conserving with respect to the surrounding reality's dynamics.
So no surprise that brain stimulation of the visual area produces sight. Our brains unfold fantastical yet authentic worlds each night, while dreaming in active sleep, unfold worlds from "holoworlds" of interpenetrated possibilities (Globus). In waking as in dreaming. (See also Llinas.) That brain stimulation produces worlds in the absence of input is precisely what we would expect of a monadic brain.
Take the Nekker cube objection. Wilson insists that the flip of the Nekker cube is something inside and nothing changes outside. *But it is the Nekker cube out there in the world that is first this way and then that way.* The alternative Nekker cubes indubitably appear to be in the world. There's never any unchanging Nekker cube, only the ones that change. The brain monad generates alternative Nekker cubes in the world...and beyond the monad's confines...well, it's dark, outside the *Lichtung*, an unfathomable quantum reality.
Painful phantom limbs? Of course! The body is a world object that anchors our thrownness, and continually unfolds within the brain monad. It is a terrible terrible terrible common sense mistake to say there is *really* no limb out there. In our brains we unfold in parallel a body without a limb and in the patient's brain he unfolds a body with a limb, the difference caused by his neuropathology.
The Goldberg and Wilson objections only make sense because they conventionally *believe* in a self-subsistent world out there that is variously represented within the mind/brain. What I'm saying instead is that there is no self-subsisting world in common out there, only parallel worlds within sporadic brain monads. (I am not claiming there is no physical reality--please, I am not an idealist!--only trying to unconfound physical reality and world.)
But does it really make sense to think of the brain as monadic? How does it work? Isn't computation supposed to be going on? Ah, if the brain has quantum degrees of freedom, then maybe we can make sense of it (based on Umezawa's account of quantum field theory and Yasue's further development of quantum brain dynamics).
Briefly, since this post is already over long: The brain hoists quantum fields representing reality, memory and cognition, and supports their interaction. Real classical order occurs in the match. (Recall that multiplying a complex number by its conjugate gives the modulus which is real, but in quantum field theory what is multiplied is complex Hermitean operators, yielding a classical order.) Thrownness in the world is where quantum reality, quantum memory and quantum cognition meet and match. Thus the brain monad supports quantum field interactions out of which world thrownness is continually unfolded.
Brother Pat Hayes (in his 3/5 post) and I are doing something awful: *horribile dictu* we're getting rid of conscious perceptual experiences on the grounds of experience itself! There is nothing mental about perceptual experience (forget all the qualia stuff that ensnares us). Such "experience" is just the facticity of our always finding ourselves already in a world. Consciousness never enters in, except perhaps at the level of language, culture and self-reflection, which is different altogether, far from any putative qualia problem.
I'm saying that there is an upsetting price to pay for this achievement of getting rid of perceptual consciousness: relinquishing the world in common, and having to accept the folly in what remains. But really, we'd be so much better off without qualia and the frightful Zombie offspring of their inexhaustible interrogation. Even if we do turn out rather strangely to be quantum neurodynamical monads running in parallel (kept coherent by conserving real symmetries in the common input flux). Why not just (1) stick to "con-sciousness" in a literal sense, as knowing together, which requires language and community, and supports self- reflection (viewing self as other), (2) forget qualia, zombies and zimboes, and (3) "throw off the chains of maya"?
Gordon Globus
GGlobus@orion.oac.uci.edu
Globus, G. 1987 Dream Life, Wake Life. State Univ. of N.Y. Press.
Llinas, R.R. & Pare, D. 1991. Of dreaming and wakefulness. Neuroscience 44, 521-535.
Umezawa, H. 1993 Advanced Field Theory. Physics Institute of America.
Jibu and Yasue, 1995. Quantum Brain Dynamics and Consciousness. John Benjamins.
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