Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem - UCI Cognitive ...

Conscious Realism and the Mind-Body Problem 105This comment is correct, pace Kant. Space, time, particles, and thereforenatural selection are all within the user interface. But this claimcomports well with recent attempts in physics to construct a theory ofeverything – including space, time and particles – from more fundamentalconstituents, such as quantum information and quantum computing (e.g.,Lloyd 2006), loop quantum gravity (Smolin 2006), and others (e.g., Callenderand Huggett 2001). Space-time, classically conceived as a smoothmanifold, appears untenable at the Planck scale. Instead there appear tobe “pixels” of space and time. The intuition that space-time is a fundamentalconstituent of an observer-independent reality seems destined tobe overturned by theories of quantum gravity.The ontology of conscious realism proposed here rests crucially onthe notion of conscious agents. This notion can be made mathematicallyprecise and yields experimental predictions (Bennett et al. 1989, 1991;Bennett et al. 1993a,b; Bennett et al. 1996). Space precludes presentingthe mathematics here, but a few implications of the definition of consciousagent should be made explicit. First, a conscious agent is not necessarilya person. All persons are conscious agents, or heterarchies of consciousagents, but not all conscious agents are persons. Second, the experiencesof a given conscious agent might be utterly alien to us; they may constitutea modality of experience no human has imagined, much less experienced.Third, the dynamics of conscious agents does not, in general, take placein ordinary four-dimensional space-time. It takes place in state spaces ofconscious observers, and for these state spaces the notion of dimensionmight not even be well-defined. Certain conscious agents might employ afour-dimensional space-time as part of their MUI. But again, this is notnecessary.From these comments it should be clear that the definition of a consciousagent is quite broad in scope. Indeed, it plays the same role for thefield of consciousness that the notion of a Turing machine plays for thefield of computation (Bennett et al. 1989).7. The Mind-Body ProblemWe now use MUI theory and conscious realism to sketch a solutionto the mind-body problem. Exactly what that problem is depends, ofcourse, on one’s assumptions. If one adopts physicalism, then the centralscientific problem is to describe precisely how conscious experience arisesfrom, or is identical to, certain types of physical systems.As we discussed before, there are no scientific theories of the physicalistmind-body problem. If one adopts conscious realism, then the centralmind-body problem is to describe precisely how conscious agents constructphysical objects and their properties.