Testable predictions
John McCrone
>What about the hard problem?
> In the Orch OR model qualia are related to the essence of the
> sensory stimulus, and at their deepest levels are particular
> patterns in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale.
> The redness of a rose is a particular arrangement at the Planck
> scale. The sound of an oboe is a different particular type of
> pattern in fundamental spacetime geometry at the Planck scale.
> Orch OR within those specific neurons recreates the same
> patterns at the fundamental level in the brain. The sound of an
> oboe is specific Planck scale patterns in auditory cortex,
> the redness of a rose is different particular Planck scale
> patterns in visual cortex.
So you are saying that there is a red rose out there creating a
particular Planck-scale dent in space-time and I will have a red rose
qualia whenever the same shaped dent occurs in my brain?
But how does the 3-D shape of this rose get to be transmitted to the
depths of my brain? Ambient light bounces off the rose and through my
eyeballs, hitting the flat mapping surface of my retinas. This
subsequently gets turned back into a 3-D qualia by a lot of brain work -
work that includes fleshing out the experience with stored memories
about the "normal" shape of roses as well as the processing of available
sensory cues to create a feeling of rounded space. So you believe that
the brain takes crudely sampled input, subjects it to a hierarchy of
processing, mixes it with a lot of stored knowledge, shakes down an
interpretation of what probably caused the initial retinal disturbance -
then projects a Plank-scale replica of all this on some handy mesh of
microtubules?
Doesn't this mean, at the very least, that the brain's Plank-scale
representation of the rose is going to be an interpreted recreation of
the real thing, not the external Plank-scale disturbance transplanted in
some fashion? That is unless your microtubules simply resonate with
outer reality in some direct manner (and the brain goes through all its
known information processing hoops for no particular reason).
The story seems even worse with the redness of the rose - after all
Stuart, remind me, do retinas see colours or wavelengths? If you admit
that the rose only has "wavelengthness" as a physical property then why
should replaying the Planck-scale geometry of this wavelength in the
brain cause something else - the sensation of redness? Indeed spectral
absorbence is surely the real property "in" your external rose-shaped
dent in Plank-scale space-time - and so the thing that would also have
to be recreated in the brain's microtubules to give a red rose qualia?
Or does the brain manage to recreate both the absorbence and reflectance
aspects of the Plank-scale real world events?
Or maybe you want to argue that redness really is an inherent physical
property of matter and so it is even likely, in some pan-psychic
fashion, that "red" wavelengths bouncing off "red roses" actually
experience themselves as being red - they are qualia unto themselves?
And that for some unknown reason, both we and these "red" wavelengths
experience our qualia in the particular format we know as "colour",
rather than in some perhaps more naturalistic fashion, like a
"vibrational tingle"? If perception is a direct replication of
space-time geometries, why doesn't a red rose give us a kind of slow
eyeball buzzing and a blue rose give us a fast eyeball buzzing? Colour
becomes even more mysterious when you consider the alternative
instantiations of the qualia.
Anyway, it should be apparent from the above that Orch OR suffers the
usual hard problem of why any physical process should have a subjective
aspect. Even if our microtubules do make precise recreations of physical
reality, why should we then light up in a state of qualia-experiencing?
Orch OR remain mutes on the "why" even if you believe it answers the
"how".
So Orch OR is based on an implausible mechanism (one that demands new
physics and new biology even to get off the ground as a theory). And
when granted this mechanism, it still does not offer a way of bridging
the explanatory gap. In fact Orch OR leaves you far worse placed than
the mainstream information processing approach which can at least
explain something about why our awareness is the way it is (heavily
interpreted, subject to illusions, variable of focus, intentional and
oriented, culturally and verbally extended, etc). And by stressing that
consciousness is a construction, the information processing approach
also explains why something physical (wavelength) can be experienced in
terms of something else (colour) that no longer has a clear or direct
connection with brute physical space-time geometry (on any scale). Orch
OR only succeeds in making the mysterious even more mysterious than it
need be.
Cheers
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from John McCrone
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