Last week, we saw that phenomenal consciousness, which is the “stage” upon which the world reveals itself to us as phenomena, is itself not a phenomenon, which makes any account of it—especially in material(ist) terms—exceedingly difficult. But to see just how serious the issue is, we need to move from a consideration of our own consciousness to how we might learn about the phenomenality of other people.

Red things just appear red to me, of course. But let’s say that we set up a little experiment. We find a hallway with a 90° turn. I sit at the corner itself and look down one leg of the hallway. I put a paint swatch at the other end of the hall, but I don’t tell you what color it is. You sit in the other leg of the hallway and look at me. I stare at the paint swatch, focusing on its color (spoiler warning: it’s green).

But what do you see? You see my head, and you see me staring intently. Within my brain, complex neurological activity is happening, which involves information processing that allows my brain-body complex to recognize the color green (understood as a specific hertz value of the electromagnetic radiation that struck my retina). This involves my eyes, the optic nerves, and probably many different sections of my brain. This is complicated, but not fundamentally mysterious. We can describe the process, beginning with the light bouncing off the swatch and ending with a brain state of “seeing green”, and we can describe it in purely mathematical terms. Meanwhile, also, this same process (somehow) results in my consciousness hosting the appearance of the quality of greenness (among many other things).

But where does the quality of greenness occur? Let’s say we isolate the part of my brain that actually process visual information and does the green-seeing. If we were able to install a little transparent window on the side of my head, would we expect to see that part of my brain glowing green?

Continue reading at: https://open.substack.com/pub/phenomenologyeastandwest/p/consciousness-is-not-a-phenomenon-f8a