Phenomenal Space

Reflexive monism is, in essence, an ancient view of how consciousness relates to the material world that has, in recent decades, been resurrected in modern form. In this paper I discuss how some of its basic features differ from both dualism and variants of physicalist and functionalist reductionism, focusing on those aspects of the theory that challenge deeply rooted presuppositions in current Western thought. I pay particular attention to the ontological status and seeming “out-thereness” of the phenomenal world and to how the “phenomenal world” relates to the “physical world”, the “world itself”, and processing in the brain. In order to place the theory within the context of current thought and debate, I address questions that have been raised about reflexive monism in recent commentaries and also evaluate competing accounts of the same issues offered by “transparency theory” and by “biological naturalism”. I argue that, of the competing views on offer, reflexive monism most closely follows the contours of ordinary experience, the findings of science, and common sense.

This brief note corrects some basic errors in Meijsing’s (2011) JCS paper on “The Whereabouts of Pictorial Space”, concerning the status of phenomenal objects in the reflexive model of perception. In particular I clarify the precise sense in which a phenomenal object relates to the object itself (the noumenal object) in visual perception.

Mathematical physics relies foundationally on symbols, for expressing e.g. hypothetical relationships between various natural phenomena. Curiously, to date, both mathematical physics and science more generally have lacked an explicit symbolism for conscious experience. Consequently, physical theory has simply overlooked a number of acute problems with standard theories of the brain-experience relationship – as well as overlooking a number of problems and opportunities for physics itself, and for science-as-a-whole!
This paper remedies the notational gap in current physical theory, by defining a new symbol class for conscious experience. Of course, it could be that new symbols are trivial. But this paper refutes that possibility directly, uncovering new and fundamentally-interesting content in six experience-related topic-areas (emergence, experiments, evolution, spatiotemporal relationships, theories-of-everything, and the foundations of science). Ten specific puzzles are identified as future research directions.

Perceptual-role theories of mental qualities hold that we can discover the nature of a being’s mental qualities by investigating that being’s capacity to make perceptual discriminations.  Many advocates of perceptual-role theories hold that the best explanation of these capacities is that mental quality spaces are homomorphic to the spaces of the physical properties that they help to discriminate.  This paper disputes this thesis on largely empirical grounds, and offers an alternative.  The alternative explains interesting patterns in our perception of color differences and similarities across edges, emphasizing the importance of visual discontinuities.  Further, it provides a simple explanation of the intransitivity of indiscriminability. The homomorphism thesis can explain this intransitivity only with the addition of an independently unsupported empirical hypothesis.  Also, in contrast to the homomorphism thesis, the alternative view is perfectly consistent with empirical data that suggests (a) that the visual system uses the dynamic allocation of a limited range of responses in order to discriminate a wider range of physical stimuli and (b) that we are much better at detecting changes in relative luminance than changes in absolute luminance.  Moreover, it does all this while using a more efficient strategy for encoding sensory information.

The geometrical incongruence between patterns in visual space and structures and patterns of activity in the visual cortex, long known to investigators, serves as a criterion for evaluating physical theories of visual space. The problem of determining the geometry of the visual world (visual geometry) is compared with that of determining the geometry of the physical world (physical geometry). Theories as to the possible physical locus of visual space, whether in the brain or elsewhere, are reviewed, analyzed, and criticized accordingly. It is concluded that on the basis of congruence alone it would be predicted that visual space is not to be found in the brain, even though it is seemingly linked to it causally, as experimental neurology and neurophysiology demonstrate. Alternative theories as to the nature of visual space are considered, but are also found to be inadequate in explaining visual space in terms acceptable to contemporary science.