Perception, Evolution, and the Mind Body Problem
Abstract
Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, conscious experience. This failure is remarkable, since we have a large body of empirical correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity somehow creates, or is, conscious experience. This has led Colin McGinn, Steven Pinker and others to speculate that Homo sapiens lacks the concepts needed to formulate a scientific theory of the mind body problem. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that reverses the normal assumption: neural correlates of consciousness occur because consciousness creates neural activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world, even down to subatomic particles. To this end, I develop two theses. The multimodal user interface (MUI) theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species specific, user interface to that world. I argue for MUI theory on Bayesian and evolutionary grounds. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and empirically explored in the normal scientific manner. I provide a mathematical formulation of conscious agents and their dynamics, and use them to propose a solution to the mind-body problem. I also provide a brief mathematical disproof of the currently dominant approach to cognitive science and the mind-body problem—reductive functionalism. A preview of the talk is available online in these two papers: http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/%7Eddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/%7Eddhoff/ScrambleProof.pdf
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