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Empiricism and fallibilism are the foundations of science. No amount of evidence can ever prove a theory, but it only takes one piece of evidence to disprove a theory. “Evolution could so easily be disproved if just a single fossil turned up in the wrong date order. Evolution has passed this test with flying colours.” - Richard Dawkins. As Renee Descartes' philosophy put "I think therefore I am" and knowledge of one's existence as the foundations of knowledge, some aspects of experience can also share the same epistemological status of certainty. Scientific theory never obtains such status nor can any evidence obtained by it, hence its called falsifiable, and falsifying mainstream views of nature is what the following observations do.
Consciousness is a really existing phenomenon that physics is compelled to account for. We know what particles in the standard model the brain, neurons, and electromagnetism are composed of and yet how it all gives rise to consciousness remains a mystery. To be clear I'll define consciousness as perception; awareness of self or sensory experience. While quantum field theory considers particles as vibrations in continuous fields, the mainstream view of matter, even within QFT, is of independent (key word) particles, atoms, and molecules, with interaction between them taking place predominately through non-hidden local causal influence (Locality is influence from things in the immediate surrounding, non-locality is influence by things far away, and a hidden variable is an alternative local explanation for phenomena thought to be non-local like entanglement). It’s assumed that a reductive approach with this description of matter can explain consciousness but the idea that it ever could is an absurd one.
The prevailing view of consciousness in science concludes that it is located entirely in the brain and is premised upon 4 things,
1. There is only one type of substance matter, which is made up of particles
2. Non-hidden local interactions between particles and atoms predominates in the brain and nature.
3. Consciousness is composed of and reduces to matter
4. Consciousness arises post processing in the brain
If I am many particles all at once and my brain can be aware of this, how could purely local causation with no hidden-variable ever explain that? Continuous fields maybe able to account for unification but how could a system of exclusively local causation between particles and atoms ever have direct knowledge (direct- without intervening factors; knowledge- true belief; direct knowledge- knowledge direct from experience) of not just working as a whole but something being the whole? I am ever present throughout my body, the simultaneous awareness of each point in space at a single moment in time would be a faster-than-light phenomenon in this model as its awareness of everything, everywhere, all at once (Thanks Hollywood). Thus it demands a non-local or hidden variable explanation and therefore premise 2 is false.
God has given us eyes that could not see and ears that could not hear. In order to understand how nature works scientists studied the dust, and nature as though it was casting a spell put their minds to sleep. What we saw and heard was no longer outside of us but in our heads, colors were divorced from the objects they belonged to, a human was not one soul but a mere conglomerate of particles, and some even denied experience altogether. I experience my existence and so I know for certain that I exist. Experencio ergo sum, I experience therefore I am. I ask myself what am I? I sense my being, and I return a response. I am a single 3-dimensional object in the shape of a human passing through time. That I am traveling through time may mean that I am really a 4-dimensional object, however only the existence of the three spacial dimensions are obvious. My body is situated in a spacial environment that I also perceive to be only 3-dimensional, as again a 4th dimension of time or any higher dimensions if they exist aren’t immediately obvious, though I do perceive the passage of time in the environment. When I touch an object with my finger, the sensation of the touch occurs in the location where my finger is touching that object. When I hear a noise, the sound I sense is in the location of the sound’s creation, such that if I am standing on a sidewalk and a car passes by in the far away lane, the sound of the engine is in the location around the engine and the cars position in space can be known to me merely through sound alone. When I see an object, the sight of that object is in the location where that object is (unless something is distorting my perception). While it may seem obvious that all this is the case if you are like me, a sentient human, the phenomena of perceptions that I just described are inexplicable by the prevailing paradigm in physics and neuroscience.
Consciousness is widely considered to be in the brain, with what we perceive through the senses occurring when matter of some sort, collides with our sense organs, which then propagate an electro-chemical chain reaction through the nervous system and into the brain to be processed, which is then followed by conscious perception. Since perception arises post-processing many conclude consciousness must be located in the brain. However, when my finger touches an object and it sends a chain reaction through the nervous system to the brain, the sensation that follows does not occur in the location of my brain, it occurs in the location of my finger, where the chain reaction began. Mainstream biology and neuroscience do not speak of a return sensory signal to the finger that tells it its having a sensation, yet the location of the sensation is fact, to dispute it means you reject empirically knowable truth, or your consciousness is different from my own, or you’re a philosophical zombie that doesn’t experience.
Perhaps I am a homunculus inside the brain? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument) If so then the homunculus is THE THINKER not the brain that I would exist in, for I am now speaking of MY existence and can tell you of MY experience from a first-person perspective. Suppose I am a homunculus in the middle or the front of my brain, that would mean me and the environment I perceive is made up mostly of neurons and whatever else is in the brain. None of which I can experience for what it actually is, as I would be experiencing it only as the representations of what ever large scale objects are in the outside world and neural pathways, that I can’t detect, from outside this dome of experience would be sending information inside to MY finger, that causes MY finger to feel a sensation. The homunculus would then be able to tell the part of the brain responsible for cognition that IT felt the sensation in that location of space where the representation of my finger is. What about our current model of physics can explain the existence of or experience of the homunculus? When and how do ions flowing into and out of neurons turn into this computer? When I turn my head and look at something else, how do those same neurons turn into a completely different image? If I put a green triangle 10 inches in front of my face, and then trade it for a purple circle 10 inches in front of my face, wouldn’t it be the same group of neurons making both images? You might say that maybe the frequency at which the neuron fires changes the color. Why then would some neurons, that are virtually identical, produce sound, or taste, or smell, or touch and not color or the other sensory qualities? You might respond well those neurons are not processing vision and color. To which I respond what influence does any other neuron have on the neuron that turns green or purple besides the frequency at which it fires? If it were the case that the type of sensation (qualia) that arose was dependent on other neurons, it would have to be a non-local (or hidden variable) causal influence as the neurons involved in processing all the senses are virtually identical. Premise 2 would then would be false. Even so what plausible physical mechanism can one give using current theory for how neurons disguise themselves as the image and feeling of this computer or the sounds it produces when I type on it? Now lets say maybe the size or shape or some other known variable of the neuron could effect the type of sensation it produced, wouldn’t we be talking about phenomena and properties that physics knows nothing about? All you would really be saying in these counter-arguments is that a sensation is a function of more or less particles or ions being present in a neuron or how often particles or ions flow in and out of it. Would that not then be calling it an emergent property? Absent a theory of emergence consistent with physics would not such an appeal be as good as an appeal to magic? Perhaps there is magic, who knows? There is more to heaven and earth than is realized by your science O' Ratio.
It seems the homunculus concept isn't salvageable without an appeal to dualism or a new radically different understanding of matter. Now, suppose dark matter was a "field of consciousness", even if the neurons were interacting with dark matter to create a "realm" inside of the brain, what would be responsible for the organizing of experience into a self-aware 3-dimensional human shaped body? Would appeal to computation even make any sense in a reductive way or would it just be obfuscation? Not only would burden of proof be on those making the appeal but the burden of providing an intelligible description of a mechanism or at least explaining what it meant in a physical sense would also be on them. Would it not be more reasonable to conclude that the reason experience is organized in this way is because you're embodied in your actual body that is already organized this way? Until evidence to the contrary arises Occam's razor would suggest so. If neurons in the brain can be said to be interacting non-locally (or with a hidden variable) why not all the neurons in the whole body's nervous system? And if the body is interacting non-locally (or with a hidden variable) why presume that it’s not interacting in such a way with the actual environment around it?
The current paradigm in physics only talks about the one way causal chain reaction from the collision of outside matter with the body resulting in a signal propagated through the nervous system and brain but what is the orientation of your perception of sight and your perception of the thoughts about what you’re seeing? Vision is processed in the back of the brain by the occipital lobe and the temporal lobe, while thoughts are produced in the frontal lobe in the front of the brain, yet my conscious perception of what I see is external to my body in front of the internal perception of my thoughts. The conscious perception of sound is also occurring externally. Just by listening with my ears, I am capable of sensing being in a 3-dimensional environment and can hear sounds in the locations they are originating from. To clarify my conscious visual perception is not in my eyes or in my brain, its extending from my eyes over to the locations of whatever I am looking at. My hearing is not in my ears or my brain. My hearing, the conscious perception of sound, is outside of my body wherever the thing producing the sound is located. It is as though I am unified with the environment around me.
Given that I can speak of these phenomenal experiences, there seems to be a sort of feedback loop between the thing being phenomenally experienced and the brain, that is more than just a single return back to the location of experience. If you look at a tree, photons bouncing off the tree hit your eyes, cause an electro-chemical chain reaction through the brain to the visual processing center, it gets processed, then conscious visual perception extends out from the eyes to the tree, and then you have knowledge of the external perception of the tree (This is not to suggest that something ever moves at light speed back to the tree from the eyes, just that there is perception located between your eyes and tree). The greenness of a leaf is not in my brain, and as far as I can reason, it’s not a property of the photons that bounced off the leaf either, because the photons are not in the location of the leaf anymore, while the color is. The color thus seems to be some property of the leaf that can be detected when certain wavelengths of light bounce off of it and one has eyes and a brain capable of processing that color. When I say “the green is over there on the leaf”, I am making a statement about the qualia or the greenness of the green on the leaf, contained in the external perception of the leaf. It is knowledge of what the external perception of the leaf is like. The qualia itself must then be having a causal effect on the movement of the normal matter inside my brain in order for me to speak of it. Yet qualia is something that we become aware of post-processing of the matter that collided with our sense organs. The statement “the green is over there” seems to contain either post-experiential knowledge or knowledge gained simultaneously with experience. If we do know things about an experience post-experience or simultaneously with it and if experience is post-processing, where does the knowledge come from if not for a secondary processing, entanglement or some non-local (or hidden variable) interaction similar to entanglement occurring between the brain and the location of perception? Maybe quantum fields and non-local (or hidden variable) interaction of normal matter can account for the continuousness and unified working of the body and its connection with the environment, I do not know. If so then quantum field as substance should not be underestimated, for I am not just the particles but the space between them as well. On this note I think it's important to recognize that space is not nothing. "we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable."- Albert Einstein https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358617464_Ether_and_the_Theory_of_Relativity. The nature of dark matter, or dark gravity, and whether or not it plays a role in this I do not know either, however it is an unknown substance, with unknown properties, that has only been detected through its gravitational effects. Since the mechanism of sensory perception has thus far evaded detection, if dark matter was responsible it would explain why. What ever the case may be, nature is not working the way it is believed to.
The most extraordinary of abilities is the power to answer the question of “what am I?”. The locus of “I” is in the brain and I extend outward through the whole body. I am not merely a system of separate particles bouncing around. If I am made up of particles, I am all of those particles for I am one. I am my whole being at a single instant in time and I can tell my frontal lobe, that that is what I am! The brain claiming that I'm the whole self and me actually being the whole self is not a mere coincidence of a delusional brain accidentally being correct. I have the power to verify the truth on demand at anytime by sensing myself when ever I so want to. Physicists speak of dust but I am a soul, a unified whole controlling the parts to speak of its existence. While there is much about my experience that is uncertain, there are some aspects of my experience that are undeniably real. The existence of these phenomena, are directly knowable to be certainly and incontrovertibly real via empirical observation, and as such should not be dismissed in order to protect favored theories and beliefs. I am not anti-science and its not anti-science to say that the scientific community needs to accept that their beliefs don’t match up with experience, it’s pro-empiricism. It’s time to awake from the sleep of the dust of the Earth and discover the truth of our reality
