Consciousness is not inside the brain.
It is identical with the object that exists relative to the body.
The object and the experience are not separate (O = E). Experience is not an image of the world mysteriously tied to it by some unintelligible relation. Experience is nothing other than the object itself, insofar as that object exists relative to our body and our brain. To look for consciousness — as though it were the place where the world appears — is a pseudo-problem. Existence relative to the body absorbs all the variations we once ascribed to subjectivity. There is, literally, no consciousness as opposed to existence … only EXISTENCE.
You see a red apple. The question is: where is the red you are seeing?
Twentieth-century philosophy answered, in a thousand variants: inside your head. A neural representation, a subjective quale, a brain state sealed off from the external world. The apple is out there, gray and mute. The red is in here, produced by the brain.
My answer is simpler and, for some, scandalous: the red is where you always thought it was — on the apple, in the world. Your experience of red is the red apple, existing relative to your body.
There is no inside and outside. There is no copy. There is only the world, differentiated by its relation to your body. And you are that world, existing relative to your body and your brain.
The traditional view has a problem.
In the dominant paradigm there are three entities: the external object O, the brain B, and the experience E.
Between O and B there is a causal chain — light reflected by the apple strikes the retina, the neurons fire. So far, physics. The trouble is the next leap: how does B produce E? How does a neural discharge become the red I see? This is the hard problem of consciousness, and the traditional answer cannot meet it because the problem is ill-posed.
The implicit dualism — inside/outside, subjective/objective, phenomenal/physical — is not a scientific discovery. It is an assumption that carries with it the whole weight of the modern history of the philosophy of mind.
Panpsychism, functionalism, neural correlates, qualia: all of them variations on the same wrong turn — looking for our consciousness inside the brain. But why should we think that inwardness is the inside of the brain?
The road toward the mind-brain problem is paved with good empirical intentions that have so far led nowhere. The MOI does not take that road: it returns to the fundamental fork — is the subject distinct from the object? — and takes the other direction. We are not a brain that sees the world; we are the world itself, existing relative to the body and the brain.
The four themes of the MOI
We are not a mind that looks at the world. We are the world — that portion of reality which exists relative to our body. The rainbow and the apple as paradigm cases.
Read →Everything exists relative to other things. The apple in the mirror and the distant cyclist show that relativity is not subjectivity: it is the structure of the real.
Read →Dreams, hallucinations, chimerical objects: unusual paths to the real world. And the diffuse present that embraces everything the body touches causally.
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