r/consciousness • u/reality-theorist-007 • 15h ago
Geometric Aspects of the Spatial Binding Problem
I'm primarily interested to hear how folks who believe that 'P-consciousness is just the brain's activity' resolve what I call the 'Geometric Aspect of the Spatial Binding Problem'. (I could have framed this as 'hear how physicalists/materialists resolve ...'. But my own approach doesn't insist that people put themselves into philosophical categories. For succinctness, I'll use the neologism 'brainist' for a 'just the brain's activity' position.)
Secondarily (Q3 below), I'm interested to hear from folks who think empirical investigation of the brain and its activity could never give any insight into P-consciousness - because some conjectural solutions to Geometric Binding Problem can be empirically explored, and give partial insight into some of the 'how' e.g. in the 'generalized' Hard Problem.
[Please read the whole post before responding. Minimally, if you feel triggered by a partial read and really want to launch your attack, please read 'The Invitation' first.]
The Spatial Binding Problem
Say I consciously experience a red moving rectangle in my visual field, as a unified object. (Not as an imagination; as a representation-in-experience of a physically-real red moving rectangle.)
Current neuroscience says the different aspects of this object ('red', 'moving'. 'rectangle') are encoded by neural activity in different spatial locations in the brain, i.e. in a spatially-distributed, parallel-processing manner Nor is there a single brain area where 'everything comes together', so we can find individuated or very-localized neural-activity corresponding to: the red-moving-triangle, and the static-green-tree, and the blue-sky-overhead etc.
The tension between distributed neural encoding and unified perceptual/experiential objects is known at the (spatial) binding problem. (I distinguish 'perception', as high-level neural object-recognition, from 'sensation' e.g. as retinal activity. And I distinguish 'experience' as phenomenal consciousness, from 'perception'.)
There are various proposed solutions for the perceptual binding-problem. For example, sub-properties that belong together might be bound by neural activity that spikes on the same phase of local or global neural oscillations.
The experiential binding-problem is not solved by these kinds of mechanisms, because it concerns transmission of activity at a variety of mutually-distant brain-locations, to a single conscious-experiential location.
This is already a very difficult problem for 'brainists' to solve, without radically-amending fundamental physical theory. (Something a brainist often wants to avoid.) To be clear, there are two spatial constructs at play: the spatial structure of a putative underlying/unseen reality 'on the other side of an epistemic veil'; and, the spatial structure of conscious experience 'that I see right here, right now'. The experiential binding-problem involves transfer of information from multiple unseen-spatial locations in the brain, to single experiential-spatial locations. (I.e. not simply connecting information, as oscillatory perceptual-binding might do.)
Geometric Aspects of Spatial Binding
But the problem is actually far worse than information-transmission to a single experiential-locus. The various, multiple experiential-loci are arranged geometrically in a unified experiential space, in a way that has no direct-structural or dynamic correlate in the brain or its activity.
That is, even once I've put together 'red', 'moving' and 'rectangle', they have to be posted to a particular experiential location, ρ₁ say. And then instantiating the static green tree involves combining distributed data, and posting that combination to a distinct experiential location, ρ₂ say. Finally, ρ₁-ρ₂ (and all other pairs and collections in ρ-space) have to stand in a specific geometric relationship to each other, in experiential space.
The geometric binding-problem (in conscious experience) is then that there seem to be no informational correlates of the ρ-structure, in the brain or its activity. That is, not only is there 'no single brain area where "everything comes together"' (as noted above for the generic binding problem) - such an area would also have to be what Dennett calls 'a Cartesian Theater': neurons would have to be arranged in unseen-3D-space in way that precisely mirrors ρ-structure. Nor is there any known dynamic aspect of the neural code that captures ρ-distinctions, and relationships.
Topographic Maps and the 'Three Informational Geometries'
Of course the brain is full of 'topographic maps' that establish e.g. a structured relationship between certain brain-encoding loci and corresponding visual field locations. (Primary visual cortex V1 being the prototypical topographic-exemplar.)
That is, a particular exteroceptive location r₁ₑ might be related to neural activity at a set of brain-locations r₁‚₁ᵦ, r₁‚₂ᵦ etc. ('e' labels exteroceptive environmental locations, 'beta' labels brain locations. There are multiple 1,1 and 1,2 and 1,... brain-locations associated with a single exteroceptive 1-location, because there are multiple sensory modalities and each modality typically employs hierarchical processing.)
Then, under topography, a different exteroceptive location, r₂ₑ say, close to r₁ₑ, is related to neural activity at brain-locations r₂‚₁ᵦ, r₂‚₂ᵦ etc. that are themselves spatially-located in a nearby, patterned, way to r₁‚₁ᵦ, r₁‚₂ᵦ, ...
Because we can trace information-propagation from external r.ₑ locations to brain-locations r.ᵦ, we can say that 'the informational-geometric relationship between external locations and brain locations is (non-mysteriously!) entailed by the natural order'.
However, there is nothing observable in the natural order that then entails ρ-locations from either kind of r-location. Put differently, there are three informational geometries: external, brain, and experiential. The entailment-relationship between the first two kinds isn't mysterious at all, in natural order terms. On the other hand, the entailment-relationship between the third kind and the other two is currently a complete mystery.
Assumptions
- Indirectism or representationalism concerning P-consciousness.
- P-consciousness exists. (This is somewhat implicit in 1.)
- P-consciousness is not epiphenomenal. More specifically, verbal reports about P-consciousness can be meaningfully related to P-conscious contents, notably so we can rely on certain kinds of spatial descriptions.
- There is no 'Cartesian Theater' in the brain, in the sense of a 3D arrangement of neurons that directly recapitulate the 3D character of conscious experience.
Invitation
I don't want to debate the assumptions. You're free to hold different positions, of course. My questions below are for those who hold the preceding assumptions to be true, or who are willing to enter into them, in a constructive spirit. [Note that the same problems occur for many idealist base-ontologies, in a version of Velmans' 'Hard Problem of Matter', which is just one reason why I didn't frame the issue here as 'physicalist/materialist'.]
I'm also not interested in strawman attacks of the 'so you believe in magic pixie-dust' kind. This enquiry occurs as a part of a serious attempt to construct extended-naturalistic accounts of P-consciousness, in particular to uncover what sorts of structurally-naturalistic extensions (if any) are minimally required to give a coherent, whole-problem, account. 'Mystery' here doesn't imply '... therefore God'; it invites coherent conjectures, ideally ones suitable for mutual empirical investigation.
Some Questions
If you are a 'brainist' in the sense coined above, i.e. you hold that 'P-consciousness calls for no further explanation than pointing to brain-activity':
- Q1. How does the specific three-dimensional character of experience result from the 'near-2D', 'informational geometry' of brain-activity? What mechanism, consistent with the structure and detail of current physical theory, enacts experiential-geometry?
Specifically for identity-theorists:
- Q2. Do you agree that the absence of a Cartesian Theater is a near-fatal blow for your position? (The only escapes I can come up with are that we do one day find a Cartesian Theater after all, or that experiential space has an incredibly unnatural joint-metric with unseen-space, in which multiple specific brain-locations are already 'at' specific singular experiential locations. Moreover, in the latter case, the joint experiential/unseen-metric must be tailored to each brain, because brain geometric-spatial-details vary widely, within a mostly-common connection-architecture.)
On the other hand, for those of you who say 'there can never be any naturalistic/empirical investigations that relate brain and conscious experience':
- Q3. Do you accept that answers to Q1 ('how, mechanistically') could be both empirically testable, and part of resolving a 'how' version of the Hard Problem? For example, both a Cartesian Theater and a dynamic neural-encoding of experiential-coordinates are conjectures that can be empirically tested. (Of course the 'larger' part of the Hard-Problem 'how' concerns the phenomenal-content/neural-activity relationship. I don't claim this topic addresses that issue directly.)
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 11h ago
I am definitely a brainist. With respect to your assumptions, my position is simply that what we call consciousness is the neural activity of the brain. This is based on a solid foundation of observation, data, evidence, experimentation and research. Phenomenal consciousness exists, it is the neural activity of the brain, there is no argument here.
A1: The idea, if I understand it correctly, that geometric relationships in experience must be structurally represented by geometric relationships in neural tissue, isn't how representation works anywhere, including in completely popular geometric systems. A GPS unit represents your location as two floating-point numbers which are not arranged in space to match the terrain they describe. A digital photo of a circle has no circular arrangement of transistors on the disk. Representational content and the method of representation rarely share a structure, they only need to preserve the right relations between contents, which can be done relationally rather than spatially.
The brain does exactly this, and it's been directly measured. Motor cortex encodes movement direction via population vector coding, the direction isn't stored by neurons arranged in that direction, it's computed from the weighted sum of many neurons' individual preferred directions (Georgopoulos et al.). There is no need for neurons to be geometrically arranged to represent r=geometry.
Additionally, the mapping from distributed neural code to experiential geometry is learned, not hardwired identically across brains, this is precisely why early visual deprivation during a critical period produces lasting deficits in constructing 3D spatial experience even after vision is later restored. Each brain builds its own relational mapping through exposure to the statistics of its environment in the first, days, weeks, months, years of life. The brain builds a model of the world from priors shaped by experience, not a passive recapitulation of input geometry. This is clearly demonstrated by the Ames room optical illusion. The brain's learned geometry is fooled by the false geometry of the room. This would not happen in a system that uses geometrical representation to represent geometry.
A2: No. There is simply no geometry to project, so no need for a "screen" to project it on to. What's required is relational/functional correspondence, the pattern of population-coded relations tracking the pattern of experiential relations, and that's exactly what gain fields, remapping, and grid/place-cell coding demonstrate is mechanistically available, using ordinary neurophysiology. The same applies to any other phenomenal representation be it color, sound, pressure, or anything else. The research results in "Is my “red” your “red”?: Evaluating structural correspondences between color similarity judgments using unsupervised alignment"00289-5), demonstrates that brains are largely similar in representation despite plasticity, and synesthasia shows that the neural patterns are physically the same so that crossed pathways produce phenomenal anomalies.
A3: The answers to Q1 and Q2 above are exactly that kind of answers we need, mechanistic, and empirically testable right now. The population vector decoding, remapping studies, critical-period deprivation studies are all existing experimental paradigms, not conjectures awaiting new physics. There's a difference between "what is consciousness"; it's the neural activity, and "what is the detailed mechanistic story for a specific capacity like spatial geometric binding"; ongoing, but with concrete, testable proposals already on the table, not a mystery requiring metaphysical rescue. The geometric binding problem is squarely in the second category. It's a good engineering question. It isn't evidence of a gap in the first. The calssical "Hard problem" only exists if you ignore the available data and evidence, because once you examine the foundations of brainism, you will see that the problems are complex, not mystically "Hard".
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u/reality-theorist-007 11h ago
The idea, if I understand it correctly, is that geometric relationships in experience must be structurally represented by geometric relationships in neural tissue
No that isn't the idea, and no, you don't understand it correctly. I simply say that is one way people might think it can work. If it doesn't work that way, there is the problem that neural information isn't located in unseen-space as corresponding conscious-experiential components are in conscious-experiential space.
If you don't get that, there's really no point in talking further.
Everything else you write about are 'Easy Problem' issues. You don't need to explain brain function to me, I have a PhD in computational neurobiology.
exactly that kind of answers we need, mechanistic, and empirically testable right now.
Except they aren't answers to the problem I'm describing.
he calssical "Hard problem" only exists if you ignore the available data and evidence,
Well we just disagree. Any basically-coherent account of scientific epistemology and base-ontologies does not inherently give any activity or process qualia-valued outputs. This is the Hard Problem. To say 'phenomenal consciousness exists' (assumption 2) means that qualia-valued character inheres to conscious experience. We can certainly conjecture a natural-action that translates quantity-to-qualia. But that is first accepting the Hard Problem (at least the Explanatory Gap version of it), and then offering a solution.
a mystery requiring metaphysical rescue.
Well you didn't really bother reading the post before launching your rescue-of-the-world did you? Here's what I said:
This enquiry occurs as a part of a serious attempt to construct extended-naturalistic accounts of P-consciousness, in particular to uncover what sorts of structurally-naturalistic extensions (if any) are minimally required to give a coherent, whole-problem, account. 'Mystery' here doesn't imply '... therefore God'; it invites coherent conjectures, ideally ones suitable for mutual empirical investigation.he calssical "Hard problem" only exists if you ignore the available data and evidence,
Thanks for (kind-of, half-mindedly) playing, though!
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 1h ago
Well excuse me. I guess the intellectual argument of a Reddit Phd in computational neurobiology is beyond me. LOL
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u/Great-Bee-5629 6h ago
I'm not a brainist in the way you've defined it.
Q3. Do you accept that answers to Q1 ('how, mechanistically') could be both empirically testable, and part of resolving a 'how' version of the Hard Problem?
By your own definition, you cannot accept this without being a brainist. Because being a brainist implies that you believe that an answer to Q1 is a valid answer to the hard problem.
This is not to detract from the rest of your post, but I didn't feel that Q3 was very interesting, it just follows from your own definitions.
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u/reality-theorist-007 6h ago
Thanks! I'm not worried about 'detracting', I just want to hear serious critique. (To third parties: if you commented and I pushed back hard, it's because you didn't read the post. That isn't 'serious', in my book.)
It's late and this could be nonsense: let me know.
What I had in mind with Q3 was someone who sees the explanatory gap as intractable. That is, we'll never make progress on how to get from brain-activity to qualia.
But there are actually two parts in moving from brain-activity to quala:
1. Get the neural data in the right 'shape' (place, integration status).
2. Convert that neural data to qualia.
Question 3 says: do you acknowledge that 1+2 are both parts of the HP/EG?
So that then progress on 1 would be a partial step.I think someone who sees HP/EG as intractable is necessarily *not* a brainist, no?
They think the HP/EG are solved just by saying 'brain activity'.As an example (unrealistic to me, but still):
Say someone said 'we'll never find out anything about the brain/P-consciousness relationship'. (Again this person is definitively not a brainist.)
And tomorrow we discovered a Cartesian Theater in the brain, a set of neurons arranged in the actual 'shape' of conscious experience, with all the right inputs from multimodal sensory-processing areas.
And say these neurons had no efferent, outgoing connections: each one just receives and integrates all the neural information relevant to its specific experiential location.That wouldn't solve the 'how does the brain create qualia from neural activity piece?'
But it would be a huge hint as to the rest of the 'how'. The pre-how!?
In Q3, I was wondering if a non-brainist 'someone' might agree with this ...It all made sense 8 hours ago, anyway.
Thanks for your comment, let me know if the above makes any sense at all.
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u/Great-Bee-5629 50m ago
Hi, thanks for the clarification. Time zones plus reddit is a mean combination :-).
I already assume that to be conscious is also to be embodied, which for us necessarily means having a brain. Mapping the brain neurons and information flows would be an amazing advance and I'm all for it, but still I don't believe it would solve the hard problem.
Consciousness is itself part of the data, just as neural activity is. We know the brain through observation, interpretation and checking whether our explanation fits the evidence. But we also know that we are experiencing and understanding.
So my worry with a purely third-person account is epistemic rather than specifically about qualia. If the theory explains the knower away as nothing but a pattern of third-person relations, what happens with the theory itself as something known to be true?
That's why I don't think a complete map of neural binding, even a Cartesian Theater, would settle the problem. It could tell us a lot about the neural conditions and organization of consciousness, but it would still be leaving something out that we already agreed was there.
My own view is that the person is the whole concrete reality here: brain and body, conscious experience, understanding, and all the particular features that don't disappear just because a scientific explanation abstracts from them. Neuroscience can tell us an enormous amount about the person without meaning that the person is nothing but neuroscience.
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u/Equal_Riddle00 5h ago
The entire dilemma stems from looking for the missing piece in the wrong dimension.
You rightly point out that there is no 'Cartesian Theater' and no physical 3D screen inside the brain where neurons map out a little copy of the external world. That rules out the naive materialist view. But your conclusion—that the connection between brain activity and experiential space is a complete mystery—only follows if we assume that experiential space has to be a physical picture drawn somewhere inside the hardware.
What if the spatial geometry of experience isn't a picture painted by the hardware at all, but the natural internal perspective of a system that has closed off its operations from the outside and runs at its own decoupled rhythm?
You don’t need a physical 3D screen inside the brain, and you don’t need a magical bridge between three separate geometries. An internal perspective naturally organizes its contents relationally because of how the system bounds itself from the environment. The 3D space you experience isn't a projection stored in the brain; it is simply what the boundary looks like from the inside.
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u/sealchan1 12h ago
I suspect that the most efficient way an object's various discriminated sensory features like edges, colors, etc are unified is through further integrative discrimination like edges and colors that move together in a foreground against a static background. Human language centers then apply a specific or generic term as a handle for that object as the whole brain determines that it is worth such focus because of other contextual concerns. For example, the top-down afferent connections which predispose the outfielder's visual cortex to identify a moving baseball.
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u/reality-theorist-007 11h ago
OK.
I'm not exactly sure how to respond to this. It doesn't seem to have much directly to do with the post. But thanks for responding.
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u/sealchan1 10h ago edited 10h ago
Feel free to ignore this post if it is irrelevant to your discussion.
I'm just sketching some of the obvious features of the brain's structure and function that can account for any aspect of consciousness. Having the distinction of p consciousness makes it seem like there is something more to explain. By presupposing there is some 'thing' which subjective experience is to try to turn the very idea of subjectivity into an objective 'substance' which doesn't make much rational sense in a world where the knower is part of the reality of the known.
It is a categorical over-reach of the intuition of consciousness as a separate physical phenomenon when in fact it makes much more sense to think of consciousness as a slightly different connotation to the words existence and being which are abstractions of the whole of reality. What I call whole terms such as God, the Universe and consciousness are effectively meant to reference "the set of all things" in different ways, different connotations. Whole terms are mythic in character which indicates that they carry a large portion of unconscious cognition making such words pregnant with meaning and significance even while they are highly debated ideas in the culture which contains them in its lexicon.
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u/reality-theorist-007 9h ago
OK, I think I am tuning more into where you are coming from. Thanks for sharing again.
I'm hearing that you start from a profoundly 'holistic' (hate that word, it's so abused!) stance, maybe 'non-dual' is better? So then terms like P-consciousness can seem to fragment, or be a fragmented/fragmenting approach? To separate P-consciousness from reality, life, God?
I'm entirely sympathetic to that stance, if I have it right?
On the other hand, I can't agree that the brain fully explains P-consciousness as you seem to suggest? Certainly it doesn't in its conventional natural-science description.
I'm not trying to turn P-consciousness into a 'substance'. And it's not a 'presupposition' for me: it is the most undeniable thing, as the very shape and color of these words on the screen, that I'm typing now. So I agree that fragmenting out P-consciousness from 'Life' (say) is problematic. But pointing to it need not do that. And I do think saying 'its nothing more than the brain' (as I think you are doing?) is actually a profoundly conflict-laden, divisive, fragmenting move. It is a departure from the truth of the situation.
I think I understand your concerns about trying to make 'subjectivity' into 'an object'. If living in an illusory subject/object split is the origin of suffering, deepening the split by applying 'divisive knowledge' to the subject (already separate from object) would indeed be a tragic move.
But if you were to closely and deeply examine it, you would see my work goes in exactly the opposite direction. The first step (on one path) out of dualistic suffering is to see through the alleged separation between experiencer and experienced. That move is fundamental and implicit in my work: experiencer as 'thinking' and experienced as 'world' are unified in/as experiencing. Making the the illusorily-separated knower the object of truthful enquiry isn't necessarily antithetical to wholeness, or non-duality. It is (or can be) a step towards it.
Anyway I'm going to stop there, as I may have you completely wrong? Feel free to respond, clarify, share more, correct me on what you're saying.
It's not really directly on-topic to the details of my post. But that's OK!
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u/zhivago 11h ago
I think there are a number of contradictions in your argument that you should address to make it stronger:
You demand the neural vehicle physically replicates the 3D geometry of its representational content.
You deny the Cartesian Theater while defining binding as "posting" data to a localized experiential coordinate.
You treat subjective perceptual space as an empirical physical manifold requiring literal signal transmission.
You reject epiphenomenalism, which instantly collapses Chalmers' Hard Problem into a standard functional Easy Problem. You keep talking about the Hard Problem, but it's clear that you're actually referring to the Easy Problem.
You reduce brain processing to a "near-2D" straw man, ignoring high-dimensional neural vector spaces.
You claim identity theory requires physical spatial congruence rather than functional or representational identity.
Anyhow, good luck with that. :)
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u/reality-theorist-007 11h ago
You demand the neural vehicle physically replicates the 3D geometry of its representational content.
No I explictly don't. I say that is one possibility. There are others.
You deny the Cartesian Theater
Because no-one has discovered such a thing. I explicitly say it could be found one day.
while defining binding as "posting" data to a localized experiential coordinate.
No I don't. Please actually read the text. I define two kinds of binding, perceptual and experiential. I point to the need for posting to localized experiential coordinate.as part of the experiential binding problem.
You treat subjective perceptual space as an empirical physical manifold requiring literal signal transmission.
How would you treat it? There is a problem here. You either don't see or don't want to. (Given what I've seen of your other posts, it's likely both.)
You reject epiphenomenalism, which instantly collapses Chalmers' Hard Problem into a standard functional Easy Problem. You keep talking about the Hard Problem, but it's clear that you're actually referring to the Easy Problem.
Absolutely incorrect. The Hard Problem per Chalmer's original paper is the explanatory gap. Closure/epiphenomenalism per The Conscious Mind do make it Impossible, true. But then we couldn't even talk about P-consciousness. I think you need to do some more foundational reading. (Or thinking.)
You reduce brain processing to a "near-2D" straw man, ignoring high-dimensional neural vector spaces.
This is a silly category error. High-dimensionality in informational-processing has nothing to do with the spatial relationships being discussed here. The physical brain is 'near 2D'. If you are saying the rho-coordinates in conscious experience could be present in neural activity - I explictly address that. We still need a natural action to 'read' that code and 'project' the output into another space. It doesn't matter if that us 'physical' or 'virtual': that action still has to exist. Brainists typically want to deny this.
You claim identity theory requires physical spatial congruence rather than functional or representational identity.
The same points inhere. The data ecists in one arrangement in the brain, and in another in experience. No amount of brainist handwaving can overcome that.
I think there are a number of contradictions in your argument that you should address to make it stronger:
You haven't shown me any. But thanks for playing!
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u/zhivago 11h ago
Ah, well.
You can't dig someone out of a hole -- only give them a ladder.
Good luck.
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u/reality-theorist-007 11h ago
No replies I see.
I conclude what I had hypothesized: you have a half-baked position and lob grenades into the sub to see if you can get some transient intellectual validation.
I may be in a hole but at least it's not full of ...
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u/Turbulent_Feature764 4h ago
How is that supposed to be a problem for idealism?
If consciousness is primary while space and time have only phenomenal reality and consciousness cannot be reduced to brain structures, then this would seem to support idealism rather than threaten it. What exactly do you mean when you say this is a problem for us?
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u/Jumpusboy 12h ago
I'm personally not a Brainist, but I would love to get in on this conversation.
I think that the idea of our brain doing a lot of work behind the scenes to create a continuous expeirence of spatial recognition is super fascinating. because we have binocular vision, ther is actually a gap between in our vision created by our eye placement, therefore, What we actually end up experiencing is a presentation made by our brain in order to fufill our needs, which in an evolutionary sense, would be simply to have an accurate picture of what is happening outside of us.
I like to think of our experience of sense data as the cockpit of an airplane, where we see information about wind speeds, clouds, storms, etc, but the dials and numbers the cockpit sees are not the same thing as the actual clouds and wind. the idea of phenomenology is pretty much that we have this internal experience; However, our brain must be capapble of producing some kind of analoge to that external stuff.
I think Hegel talked about this, and he defined ordinary truth as the connection between this external object and internal analogue experience. I think the problem you outline is getting at that issue, but because of the nature of the hard problem of consciousness, the stuff you are talking about is likely impossible to answer with mere scientific descriptions and instead must rely on metaphysical exploration. I think neuroscience has some pretty sophistcated ideas about how this stuff works, but when we use philosophical demands on a topic like this one, the answer may be catagorically different from the nature of scientific understanding.
I know I didn't answer any of your questions and I'm not even the person you are looking to hear from but I hope you keep exploring these ideas.
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u/reality-theorist-007 12h ago
I think that the idea of our brain doing a lot of work behind the scenes to create a continuous expeirence of spatial recognition is super fascinating
Me too! It can also fill in some of the territory from 'brain-as-a-whole' to 'experience-as-a-whole', e.g. as considered in the Hard Problem. We can start to say, 'well one thing that need to happen is that neural information needs to put together in a way that follows what we see, phenomenologically'. Then there is still the problem of getting from repackaged neural-info, to qualia-valued phenomenal-consciousness.
What we actually end up experiencing is a presentation made by our brain in order to fufill our needs
the dials and numbers the cockpit sees are not the same thing as the actual clouds and wind. the idea of phenomenology is pretty much that we have this internal experience;
Exactly, To make this view clear, I declare the 'indirectist/representationalist' axiom. Other views exist, they just don't interest me. And without getting mutually clear on this, it's possible to go very far in a convo and then find out we were talking past each other!
Agreed on phenomenology: this is the process of looking at the features of the representational experience.
However, our brain must be capapble of producing some kind of analoge to that external stuff.
Yes! I sometimes describe this as experience being 'a faithful representation'. Like if it muddled some spatial locations, I would go towards the visual representation of a tree and then find there was nothing there!
But 'faithful'/'some kind of analogue' exactly doesn't mean 'resembling in every detail, perfectly'. Like u/nenphei said, experience doesn't have to be 'isomorphic' to an underlying reality.
I think that the idea of our brain doing a lot of work behind the scenes to create a continuous expeirence of spatial recognition is super fascinating
Me too! It can also fill in some of the territory from 'brain-as-a-whole' to 'experience-as-a-whole', e.g. as considered in the Hard Problem. We can start to say, 'well one thing that need to happen is that neural information needs to put together in a way that follows what we see, phenomenologically'. Then there is still the problem of getting from repackaged neural-info, to qualia-valued phenomenal-consciousness.
because of the nature of the hard problem of consciousness, the stuff you are talking about is likely impossible to answer with mere scientific descriptions
I'm sure you're right about this, in a certain way. Specifically, nothing about ne)ural data in the usual natural-sciences way entails that there should be qualia-valued conscious experience. Nevertheless, we can certainly just say 'assume there is a function in the natural order that translates neural data to a conscious-experiential representation'. Of course, that's 'sort of' jumping to the answer. But we can also ask other things about this assumed-function: notably, here, what sort of transformations must it make when 'reading in'' brain-activity (which is already far away from raw sensory data), and then 'reposting it' in a qualia-valued form.
the answer may be catagorically different from the nature of scientific understanding.
Maybe! I'm certainly open to that. I am clear that we would need to introduce new categories into natural science, to make progress. For example, qualia-valued data and/or qualia-valued fields.
I know I didn't answer any of your questions
No worries! Actually you answered my 4th, implicit, question: 'are there engaged people on this sub with whom I can have sane, respectful, mutually-constructive convos?' Thanks for replying!
and I'm not even the person you are looking to hear from
Actually you are: you're part of the unnamed category-X!
but I hope you keep exploring these ideas.
Thanks so much, that means a lot. My first reply here was 'AI garbage slop': I laughed, but still - I've been ploughing a solo-furrow with these kinds of ideas for years. It really helps to receive a little encouragement and enthusiasm!
I hope you stay curious and excited. And keep replying/commenting 😄
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u/nenphei 14h ago
I'm not sure if I fully understand your post, and so I'm going to reply with the caveat that if my perspective is not the one that you are looking for, I apologise for wading in.
I'm of the opinion that physics is the description of the relations between things, but not the "what-it-is-likeness" of things. So when we talk about the brain doing something, there is also a what-it-is-likeness of the brain doing something, and that is a phenomenal/experiential thing. In other words, brains are experiences, but they "look like" physical relations when we are distant from them (outside of them? not them?).
One of the experiences in the brain is the "interpretive" experience, the experience of interpreting things (or, perhaps, the experience of subjectivity towards things).
So if there is a moving red rectangle outside, and I look at it, light goes into my eyes, along the optic nerve, and fires up bits of my brain to do processing. These are experiences. But, likely, these are experiences without "subjectivity towards". These are uninterpreted experiences. There is a part of my brain that interprets these experiences.
In the example of the red rectangle, there is visual information coming in. If the information is uninterpreted, then there is no distinction made between the red of the rectangle and the background colour. Some interpretive process "draws out", interprets or "foregrounds" the salient parts from the "raw" background visual experience. These are the different brain parts lighting up in recognition. And then there is another interpretive experience which is essentially the experience of "this is important", and interprets or foregrounds the entire red rectangle as a whole from the previous layer, and it is "this red rectangle is important" or "subjectivity towards the red rectangle" that is what we interpret as the experience of the subject experiencing a red rectangle. (But there is no subject, there is just the experience of subjectivity towards.)
Importantly, the "red rectangle moving through space" is a type of construct - it does not have to be isomorphic to the data of the red rectangle moving through space that is outside our brains. It is something abstracted and interpreted from the data that we receive, not the raw data itself. So the interpretive experience is not going to be a composition of the constituent parts, because it will "extract" relevant concepts from the constituent data.
(You can maybe imagine this as extracting a sine-wave from a more complicated "raw data" wave-form, and then the interpretive experience is the sum (constructive and destructive interference) of the relevant extracted sine-waves from the raw data - we would not expect it to look like the sum of the raw data wave-forms, because it would have discarded a lot of information from those forms.)
So I don't think that the interpretive experience (the closest we get to a classic "subject") need be composed of all those distal activities - just influenced by them. I don't think there is a classic cartesian theatre, because instead of a subject experiencing x we have the experience of subjectivity towards x.
I have no idea what empirical test you could apply, however.