I may be being slow here, but is there any way in which you’re not just restating the hard problem of consciousness here? And that problem is a problem for all the alternatives so far, whether dualistic or monistic, and not just for functionalism? Whether you put consciousness on high-level organisation in the brain, or on quantum physics, or on some second substance, you’re going to have to explain how consciousness happens. The only ones who avoid that duty are the ones who say that mental things are fundamental, and then I just roll my eyes all the way around. And I don’t think the fact that functionalists haven’t solved the hard problem necessarily makes them dualists. As you said, functionalists believe that “Subjective space is some neural topographic map, the subjectively experienced body is the sensorimotor homunculus, and so forth.” Whatever criticism you want to level against that position, it sure doesn’t seem dualistic.
There are levels to the ontological problem of consciousness. The first level is the level where you don’t even have anything in your ontology that can be identified with consciousness. You can’t get past that level until you admit that’s where you’re at. All standard nondualistic materialist theories of consciousness contain something which in the theory is called “consciousness”, but which can’t be the real thing, for the reasons discussed in this post.
Consider the problems faced instead by a dualistic theory which explicitly says that there is a “stream of consciousness” with all the properties of the real thing, existing in parallel with a physical world. Such a theory has well-known problems of causal redundancy and logical economy, but it doesn’t have this problem of nothing being actually green, does it? Actual green exists in the stream of consciousness, along with all the other problematic realities of consciousness. The physical world remains colorless, but it doesn’t matter because this is dualism and the mind is located alongside the physical world, not in it.
Another type of “theory” which doesn’t have the problem of not containing consciousness is metaphysical idealism, the idea that there’s nothing outside consciousness, and thus no physical world at all. It’s all a dream or a hallucination by a disembodied entity.
So different theories of consciousness face very different problems. There are theories which explicitly, by construction, contain consciousness. Then there are theories which contain something they call consciousness, but which doesn’t have the right properties to be the real thing. What I would like to see is a physical theory which contains consciousness, not because we dualistically add the real thing, but because it inherently already contains that sort of entity.
I may be being slow here, but is there any way in which you’re not just restating the hard problem of consciousness here? And that problem is a problem for all the alternatives so far, whether dualistic or monistic, and not just for functionalism? Whether you put consciousness on high-level organisation in the brain, or on quantum physics, or on some second substance, you’re going to have to explain how consciousness happens. The only ones who avoid that duty are the ones who say that mental things are fundamental, and then I just roll my eyes all the way around. And I don’t think the fact that functionalists haven’t solved the hard problem necessarily makes them dualists. As you said, functionalists believe that “Subjective space is some neural topographic map, the subjectively experienced body is the sensorimotor homunculus, and so forth.” Whatever criticism you want to level against that position, it sure doesn’t seem dualistic.
There are levels to the ontological problem of consciousness. The first level is the level where you don’t even have anything in your ontology that can be identified with consciousness. You can’t get past that level until you admit that’s where you’re at. All standard nondualistic materialist theories of consciousness contain something which in the theory is called “consciousness”, but which can’t be the real thing, for the reasons discussed in this post.
Consider the problems faced instead by a dualistic theory which explicitly says that there is a “stream of consciousness” with all the properties of the real thing, existing in parallel with a physical world. Such a theory has well-known problems of causal redundancy and logical economy, but it doesn’t have this problem of nothing being actually green, does it? Actual green exists in the stream of consciousness, along with all the other problematic realities of consciousness. The physical world remains colorless, but it doesn’t matter because this is dualism and the mind is located alongside the physical world, not in it.
Another type of “theory” which doesn’t have the problem of not containing consciousness is metaphysical idealism, the idea that there’s nothing outside consciousness, and thus no physical world at all. It’s all a dream or a hallucination by a disembodied entity.
So different theories of consciousness face very different problems. There are theories which explicitly, by construction, contain consciousness. Then there are theories which contain something they call consciousness, but which doesn’t have the right properties to be the real thing. What I would like to see is a physical theory which contains consciousness, not because we dualistically add the real thing, but because it inherently already contains that sort of entity.