Thanks very much for your article. Will take me a while to digest it, but you are clearly a thoughtful guy with a good grasp of the subject.
Lockwood and I arrived at the same conclusion (found below), independently of one another. Our views comport with everything I know about the relevant physics, philosophy, neuroscience & etc.
______
Consciousness, in other words, provides us with a kind of ‘window’ on to our brains, making possible a
transparent grasp of a tiny corner of a material reality that is in general opaque to us, knowable only at
one remove. The qualities of which we are immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at
least of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes that go to make up the material world — morespecifically, states and processes within our own brains.
The psychologist Pribram . . . has made an interesting attempt to revive an idea originally put forward
around the turn of the century by the Ge stalt psychologists: namely that it is certain fields, in the
physicist’s sense, within the cerebral hemispheres, that may be the immediate objects of introspective
awareness ... What it would amount to, in terms of the present proposal, is that we have a ‘special’ or
‘privileged’ access, via some of our own brain activity, to the intrinsic character of, say,
electromagnetism. Put like that, the idea sounds pretty fanciful. But make no mistake about it: whether
about electromagnetism or about other such phenomena, that is just what the Russellian view ostensibly commits one to saying.
~Lockwood, 'Mind, Brain & Quantum'
See also the work of Devalois on retinotopic maps.
Steve,
Thanks very much for your article. Will take me a while to digest it, but you are clearly a thoughtful guy with a good grasp of the subject.
Lockwood and I arrived at the same conclusion (found below), independently of one another. Our views comport with everything I know about the relevant physics, philosophy, neuroscience & etc.
______
Consciousness, in other words, provides us with a kind of ‘window’ on to our brains, making possible a
transparent grasp of a tiny corner of a material reality that is in general opaque to us, knowable only at
one remove. The qualities of which we are immediately aware, in consciousness, precisely are some at
least of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes that go to make up the material world — morespecifically, states and processes within our own brains.
The psychologist Pribram . . . has made an interesting attempt to revive an idea originally put forward
around the turn of the century by the Ge stalt psychologists: namely that it is certain fields, in the
physicist’s sense, within the cerebral hemispheres, that may be the immediate objects of introspective
awareness ... What it would amount to, in terms of the present proposal, is that we have a ‘special’ or
‘privileged’ access, via some of our own brain activity, to the intrinsic character of, say,
electromagnetism. Put like that, the idea sounds pretty fanciful. But make no mistake about it: whether
about electromagnetism or about other such phenomena, that is just what the Russellian view ostensibly commits one to saying.
~Lockwood, 'Mind, Brain & Quantum'
See also the work of Devalois on retinotopic maps.