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

108 Hoffmanmore than the movement of a file icon to the recycle bin causes the binto open or a file to be deleted. A useful user interface offers, as discussedabove, concealed causality and ostensible objectivity. It allows one to act,in all but the most sophisticated situations, as if the icons had causalpowers, and in complete ignorance of the true causal chains. The perceptualconclusions of one conscious observer might be among the premisesof a second conscious observer and, thereby, inform but not cause theperceptions of the second (Bennett et al. 1989). Attractors in the asymptoticstochastic behavior of a system of conscious agents might be amongthe premises of other conscious agents and thereby inform, but not cause,their behavior (Bennett et al. 1989).So, in particular, epiphysicalism entails that the brain has no causalpowers. The brain does not cause conscious experience; instead, certainconscious agents, when so triggered by interactions with certain othersystems of conscious agents, construct brains (and the rest of humananatomy) as complex icons of their MUIs. The neural correlates of consciousnessare many and systematic not because brains cause consciousness,but because brains are useful icons in the MUIs of certain consciousagents. According to conscious realism, you are not just one consciousagent, but a complex heterarchy of interacting conscious agents, whichcan be called your instantiation (Bennett et al. 1989 give a mathematicaltreatment). One complex symbol, created when certain conscious agentswithin this instantiation observe the instantiation, is a brain.Does this view entail that we should stop the scientific study of neuralcorrelates of consciousness ? No. If we wish to understand the complexheterarchy of conscious agents in human instantiations, we must usethe data that our MUIs provide, and that data takes the form of brainicons. Brains do not create consciousness; consciousness creates brainsas dramatically simplified icons for a realm far more complex, a realmof interacting conscious agents. When, for instance, we stimulate primaryvisual cortex and see phosphenes, the cortex does not cause thephosphenes. Instead, certain interactions between conscious agents causethe phosphenes, and these interactions we represent, in greatly simplifiedicons, as electrodes stimulating brains.One objection to conscious realism and MUI theory runs as follows:It is completely obscure how this user interface could present its content.If the physical world is not accessible and completely out of reach, whereis the user interface creating its virtual world ? On which mental screen ?What is the stuff its content is made of ?The key to this objection is the concept “the physical world”. Theobjection assumes a physicalist ontology, in which the physical world isan observer-independent world comprising, inter alia, space-time, matterand fields. If one assumes a physicalist ontology, then it is indeed obscurehow our sensory experiences, which constitute our user interface,