New Empiricism

If there really is a thing called consciousness it must be here, it must be current. If it truly exists in you and me we should be able to describe what it is about our experience that is “conscious”.


Now, before jumping to conclusions about where the objects in your experience reside such as "in the brain" or "out there" try to work out the relationships between them.  There are continuous, simultaneous objects so there is a "space", how many independent axes are there for arranging the objects? Up-down, left-right etc.  Are objects extended in time? You can do this description without needing to stick a measuring rod into the experience.  There are lots of hints in the articles on this website.

Events can also be arranged over time.

In fact if we look we find that the radial separation of objects from the viewing point is related to motion and time - there are no spatially independent arrangements in our current experience between the viewing point and more apparently distant locations but there are temporally independent arrangements along this direction.

This image looks the same on paper - print it out to see.

The Necker cube shows how simply moving the eyes over an image can give this depth sensation.

It is hard to believe but the red line below is not moving across the screen at all (just blank out one side of the moving image to see that this is the case - this "illusion" is known as the phi illusion and the movement of the bars is completed in the visual cortex).  No photons are required for experience containing the moving bars - the photons just provide enough data and the brain creates the rest.

Once you have worked out the relationships within your experience propose a geometrical theory of these relationships.  Remember, nothing flows in your experience from your hand in your experience into some viewing point or from this screen in your experience into the viewing point.  Certainly photons flow from a screen into your eyes but can you see flowing photons? Of course not. We are talking about a description of your experience not a theory about flows measured by instruments. Also remember that your experience is quite a bit different from the world beyond your body, how will you describe a single viewing point in terms of the world beyond your body when you have two eyes?  If you are not careful you will make Dennett's mistake.