I’ve attempted to separate issues out again as far as possible:
1. The Hard Problem of Consciousness
You said of the Hard Problem of Consciousness: “I tend to think we have good reason to think it to be impossible in principle. For me this dissolves the ‘hard problem’ because it incoherently wants to achieve an impossible goal.”
I take you to mean that the explanatory gap is not something that science has failed to solve, but rather that explaining phenomenology in mechanistically causal terms is conceptually impossible. I think that’s an important point, but I want to say something slightly stronger: that the apparent gap may reveal something about the structure of reality, because the first-person and third-person perspectives are themselves internally situated within that reality. In other words, I’m wondering whether the conceptual discontinuity gives us any legitimate grounds for saying something of ontological significance.
I’m not suggesting that the existence of an explanatory gap by itself proves a particular ontology. Rather, I’m wondering whether it is telling us something about the kind of explanation that reality itself permits.
2. Science and Phenomenology as Entry Points
You said that relational structures “affect the senses pre-cognitively”, and I interpret you to mean that the causal interactions occur before and independently of our conceptual interpretation of them. But there is a distinction between “pre-conceptual” and “pre-experiential”. Yes, a physical structure can affect an organism before the organism forms a conceptual judgement such as “there is a tree”, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that conscious experience is simply equivalent to, or reducible to, the conceptual judgement that follows.
You also said: “I don’t see science as so much methodologically (deliberately) bracketing the subjective perspective, since it is the inevitable foundation of all science.” I agree that science does not literally begin from nowhere, and I think your point that the first-person perspective is an inevitable condition of scientific practice is well taken.
My concern is less with how science evolved than with the epistemic status we tend to give it now. Science has developed extraordinarily successful procedures for producing claims that do not depend upon the particular perspective of an individual observer. But this success can encourage the judgement that scientific description is somehow the final or exhaustive form of knowledge.
Phenomenology is clearly not perspective-free, but neither is science. Science begins from an embedded phenomenological perspective and then develops methods for abstracting away from many features of that perspective. This is why I continue to find the idea of science and phenomenology as different “entry points” useful. They aren’t two different worlds, nor are they necessarily rival accounts of reality – they are different ways of approaching what is there.
3. The Unity of the Shared World
You said: “There is no overall relational structure, since no part of the cosmos is in any relation or interaction with every other part.”
I agree. If reality is relational all the way down, then there is no single physical system that stands in direct interaction with every other system, no single relational network corresponding to the cosmos as a whole, and no ultimate node from which the whole can be represented. There is no “God’s-eye view”.
If there isn’t even one network in the sense of a completed physical totality, then we can’t solve the shared-world problem by saying: “All perspectives are ultimately perspectives within the one universal relational network.” But what, then, constitutes the unity of the world? If there is no overall relational structure, what can it mean to speak of a “totality” at all?
Perhaps the answer is that “one world” needn’t mean “one globally connected relational object”. There are overlapping, partially connected networks of relations. It isn’t necessary for you and I to have interacted with every particle in the universe for us to share a world. What matters is that there are chains and structures of interaction through which causal influence and information can propagate.
So perhaps we should distinguish ontological totality – one complete relational structure containing everything – from relational coherence – locally connected structures whose interactions generate increasingly extensive domains of shared determination.
You also said that “there are relational structures which affect the senses pre-cognitively and reliably give rise to the shared world of trees, mountains, rivers, animals, people and so on.”
I take you to be saying something like this: there is a mind-independent relational reality; organisms are themselves physical structures within that reality; those organisms enter into causal relations with other structures; and because organisms are themselves similarly constituted, those interactions produce sufficiently similar sensory information for different organisms to encounter what we recognise as the same world.
I think it is reasonable to regard that as the most parsimonious explanation of the remarkable agreement between different observers. The commonality doesn’t need to be explained by a “universal mind” – it can be explained causally. But this brings me back to the question I am most interested in: what follows ontologically if the world is relational all the way down?
If there is no independently existing thing that constitutes the ultimate ground of the others, and each node exists only in and through its relations, then the character of the shared world is always manifested *locally*. But what does that imply for our understanding of the world as a whole?
4. Internal and External Relations
We have arrived, then, at a view where the world is shared because of causal relations between its constituent structures or nodes. But is causal interaction alone sufficient to explain everything we mean by a shared world, or does phenomenology also have to be included in the picture?
What I’m getting at is this: relational structures interact; organisms are particular kinds of relational structures; organisms have perspectives; and from those perspectives we generate descriptions of the relational structures in which we participate.
But there is an important distinction here. A camera, in a perfectly ordinary sense, has a perspective: it receives information from a particular location and orientation. What it does not obviously have is a conscious experience of that perspective. So the mere existence of a perspective needs to be distinguished from the existence of phenomenology.
This is where I wonder whether phenomenology itself might be an internal feature of the relational structure, rather than something that must ultimately be treated as an observer standing on one side of a relation and an independently existing world on the other. So when I say that “perhaps the perspectives are internally related to one another”, I’m not invoking a “universal consciousness”, nor am I thinking specifically of quantum entanglement. I mean something more structural.
Similar organisms – similar kinds of nodes within the relational world – have similar information because they stand in similar causal relations to the structures around them. That explains much of what we mean by a "shared world,” but there is still the further fact that at least some of those nodes don’t merely receive information – there is something it is like for them to receive it – i.e. the fact that phenomenology is not captured simply by saying that information has been causally transmitted.
And this is where I think our discussion comes back to the original problem. Scientific descriptions are extraordinarily good at describing the causal and structural relations between things, but they don’t capture what those relations are like from within consciousness. As we have agreed, that doesn’t necessarily mean science has simply “failed” to complete the description. It may be that phenomenology cannot be accommodated within a mechanistically causal description in principle.
My question is whether that limitation is merely a fact about the conceptual tools we happen to possess, or whether it tells us something about the ontology of a relational world in which both the “outside” causal description and the “inside” experience are themselves features of the same reality.
