Indirect realism; Is my head in the world or is the world in my head?:

According to this model, the experience of the world we have is actually a miniature model taking place within the limits of our own brains. In such a way, everyone has its own private-representation of the genuine environment; we live inside our heads all the time. This current of thought is called Indirect realism or representationalism, and it explains a lot of things that direct realism can not, such as dreams: The fact that we can have an entire world experience evolving while we are not receptive to the external stimuli, I mean, during sleep, reveals the innate capacity of the brain to generate world experiences.

Indirect realism also explains easily the phenomenon of hallucinations, and exotic states of consciousness, suggesting that an alteration in the brain’s activity has direct reactions in the parameters of our “world model”, that implies all of those bizarre and stunning things that someone can experience in those mind-conditions. There are reports in which some people swear to have experienced states of mind that felt more vivid than consensual reality itself… What is quite fascinating about this is that it demonstrates that consciousness doesn’t have anything to do with behaviorism. So, what I mean is that we can perfectly have entire vivid experiences without showing external signs of behavior, or reaction. At least on a superficial level.

Dreams, as also effects induced by drug intoxication such as Salvinorum-A, or DMT illustrate easily my point. Human beings are capable of experiencing entirely hallucinated events, and not showing any kind of sign about it. Honestly, I find it quite disturbing the fact that someone can be having the most intense, overwhelming, and meaningful experience of their entire life while lying down on the floor without moving at all.

Even in our current lives, we are not even capable of having any idea of the internal states of other human beings, certainly not we would be able to know if other forms of life, such as animals, have an "internal movie".

We cannot even disprove the idea of inverted qualia; this concept refers to the incapacity of knowing if all people are indeed sharing the same kind of qualia within their private world models. I cannot know if someone is experiencing the same qualia as I do when we both agree about a “fact” from the “external world”. I cannot be sure if someone shares with me the same color “red”, for example. This is not just related to color, but it can also be extrapolated to more types of qualia; a well-known phenomenon that illustrates this is synesthesia, consisting in that some people can experience sound instead of color, and vice-versa, colors instead of scents, others can even experience flavors evoked by certain words or semantic content. And they can easily pass inadvertently among social groups.

A less awesome phenomenon is color blindness, which consists in seeing colors with certain variability… This clearly shows the arbitrary principle that determines the qualia we experience. As Andrés Goméz has said in some of his papers, any kind of qualia can represent any kind of stimuli, so, this is clear evidence that qualia values are used —by the brain— to simulate aspects of the external world. So, according to representalism, there’s qualia that is more advantageous to represent specific kinds of stimuli, hence there’s a deep-good reason why visual qualia is used by the brain to represent electromagnetic waves stimuli, rather than any other type of qualia; it’s not something incidental.

So, with all of these understood, we can argue that our common everyday-life experiences of the world are guided-coherent hallucinations unfolding in a sophisticated way, because our brains are constantly making the right atmospheric changes in our experience according to the uninterrupted flux of sense data that it is receiving from the external world. The process that involves all of this is not understood completely yet, but multiple scientific communities are making a lot of progress on this, such as Qualia Research Institute, on which model I’m basing to make philosophical insightful implications, so, I’ll be quoting the sources of their web-page (qualia-computing) if it is necessary.

Well, keeping going with this stuff, if we analyze our phenomenology, we would quickly conclude that it is impressive that a biological machine can build all of this. In an ordinary state of consciousness, the stuff that furnishes our experience express a well-defined and functional design —it seems that the brain is doing a fantastic job, in the end—, all the parts are cohesive with one another, giving rise to significant objects of experience, the different modalities or families of qualia that co-exist in our experience don’t seem interrupted, or collapsed by themselves, all parts are simply trying to do their best to contribute to a coherent, accurate, stable and efficient representation of the environment. A sufficiently complex model with a huge range of possible configurations is in the end intelligent by itself, because it has a well-explored repertoire of possible dynamics or solutions to ensure its goals. "Organizing self principles”.

Artistic representation that illustrates the main premise of indirect realism.
Author: Aarón T. M.

Why are we conscious? Seen from an evolutionary standpoint; the useful properties of consciousness…

But, wait a minute, why is it like that? The sophisticated structure of our experience has to have a deep history behind it or reasons to be this complex, right? Well, indeed, there’s a reason why this extravagant cosmic theater is happening, in the way it does, right now in front of “us” all the time, and it is called the “Darwinian principle”, well-known as natural selection, and if you haven’t noticed yet, the semantic content of our experiences are about creatures that want to survive and replicate, well, I hope don’t confuse you, but with the veil of familiarity I’m referring to us, humans.

Roughly speaking, we’re in the end organic creatures looking for safety and survival, reproducing and handing over our genes to the next generation, this is the classical chain of evolution that we’re in. So, our consciousness has been evolving too. Along with all of this biological machinery, constantly improving itself, and increasing in complexity, it has to be that way to ensure the safety of the whole organism. What I mean is that our experience is this high-complicated because it is required to be like that.

Perception is a main rule in evolution, knowing our surrounding may imply the capacity of recognizing the contexts in which we are, and therefore acting as a consequence to modify our posibilities of keep existing as biological machines. Perceiving is actually representing, as I have said on other occasions, perceiving is creating a model, otherwise, how could you make a piece of meat understand or know what is happening around it? How do you put “light” inside a brain to make it “see”?

Electromagnetic waves don't enter the brain in the same way that rays of sunlight enter through your window. You need information processing for that; basically, an intelligent model of the world happening inside, able to solve problems and send an input back to the rest of the system, and evoke a coherent reaction to the current situation. And we’re basically in that all the time, so, in essence, being a human means to be this sophisticated world-simulation —a frequently used term referring to the representation generated by the brain; associated with our world’s experience— permeated with a wide variety of qualia, also in the form of emotional values such as pleasure and pain.

Being a human literally means to be the colors, the shapes, the sounds, the people, and the world, not just the stuff we associate with the semantic self that fits with our proprioceptive and kinesthetic “avatar”, the feeling of having a body in simple terms. Your mind encompasses all that you possibly experience and know, even your model about how the world works. We all have our own private world simulation running on simultaneously; so we can organize ourselves and act according to other’s world simulations. So, returning to the main question, why does this model be implemented with sentience? Why does evolution bother to make us conscious?

We’re having a vivid, complex, multimodal, and unified experience right now, which means that evolution bothered to make some “programming” implemented with qualia due to its possible useful computational properties starting with. If consciousness were something merely incidental, would be contradictory to the fact that our experience of the world is smooth, structured, and filled with a wide variety of qualia, as we evidently experience it.

"So, evolution was not just the improvement of organic machines, but also a long experimentation with consciousness, due to its advantageous computational properties."

Disregarding the people who think that consciousness is an epiphenomenal thing, meaning that it has no causal power, I consider that they’re denying everything, even themselves.

I think this is because they usually examine the topic of consciousness through the lens of naive realism, or even from a kind of semi-indirect realism. They may think that the representation just involves some colors and bodily sensations, so aren’t really aware that actually consciousness envelops quite everything we experience, such as the external world, our interactions with other people, our knowledge, etcetera.

But come on, if consciousness was really a secondary side-effect with no longer causal power, how is it even possible that we can talk about it, that we can create models of it, or be obsessed with their flavors and textures?, colors, sounds, bodily sensations, and so on. Without disregarding the fact that the language we use on a daily basis exists for the sake of reference aspects of our conscious experience of the world. We can recognize the intrinsic quality and value of qualia, such as in the case of pleasure and pain. All of our civilization is based on these qualia values, it is evident.

Our conscious experience clearly has an influence on our actions, and decisions. As I mentioned before, we act according to qualia such as pleasure and pain. We built up our whole civilization according to that parameter, so, I consider epiphenomenalism as pure nonsense. Everything is made of qualia, don’t you see? So, we can conclude and reduce to some extent that consciousness is something that has obvious useful properties —causal power— because if it hasn’t we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Consciousness has to be the thing that makes the work easy for replicators —biological machines that generate copies of themselves—, in terms of perception.

Perceive is represent; perceive is design. Reality as an interface:

Let's take a look at our human phenomenology for a moment, I’m referring to how being a human feels like, without any kind of additional explanations, and then notice the “simplicity” of being a human at a basic level, even though according to biology we’re huge complex biological machines made of trillions of micro-replicating critters cooperating tirelessly, but we are not explicitly aware of that “underlying universe” happening, we’re not conscious of it. Our experience of the body doesn’t include all of that stuff. Proof that we’re inhabiting a model of the world, not the world itself.

Think of it like a video game interface, when I move my phenomenal hand the implied sensation is straightforward and smooth, I can do it without thinking about it, though the experience doesn’t include the millions of operations of muscle cells, nerves, and processes that supposedly involve the action of moving a hand. Which implies that we only have access to a well-defined and delimited “sensorial avatar, or representation”. This means that our phenomenal model of the body is synchronized with the huge physical body which I don’t have direct access to.

By one hand we have the model of the world that represents, and by the other, an unimaginable-complex physical world that is being represented. In summary, the brain uses a sophisticated representation to maintain a coordinated and unified behavior of the rest of the organism. We could think of our entire existence as merely the way in which a sophisticated biological machine performs exotic computational operations in order to understand its environment, in such a way that it can ensure its own survival and replicate, without necessarily worrying about the “wellness” of the thing with which it’s implementing those computations, which is consciousness. —Our existence is an aspect of the brain—.

Valence: The emotional value of experience is known by the Qualia Research Institute community as “Valence”, and it is in essence the hedonic parameter of our world simulation. To illustrate it better, we could think of valence as analogous to temperature. The brain is modulating the “emotional temperature” all the time, in order to make the perfect atmospheric changes within the model, I mean, within our experience of the world. In terms of survival. If the entire organism is in danger, or injured —which can affect its survival—, then our world simulation starts to paint itself with negative valence (pain). Therefore in the opposite way, if the organism is safe, and satisfied the experience becomes pleasant —positive valence—. So, as these little creatures that inhabit the model, it seems quite obvious. We’re at the mercy of this fancy psycho-affective matrix that envelops us.