<1>
ABSTRACT:
In this commentary on Chris Hooley's post I'd like to focus mainly on WHY we are stuck with an apparent mind-matter duality, and as a consequence juggle with all kinds of worldviews. What I propose is also meant as a straightforward solution to Dave Calmers' "hard problem". The Inverting of the Worldview becomes the issue of setting the primacy right, which Chris did as it should imo. This commentary is thus more additional to his article. It is a bit unstructured, for which excuses.

<2>
Experience has never been an "observable"; this creates "the hard problem" of getting it on-spot in the equations in physics for instance -- one can put it practically anywhere, to ones own taste. I can observe my own physical brain by looking at it through a microscope, but I will never find the observation of looking at my brain in there, nor anywhere else in the physical world, from any different chosen angle, or distance. This makes experience "ghostlike", like a ghost in a machine. What actually happens, as I see it, is a "cat chasing its own tail effect", metaphorically speaking. Later in this commentary some more about that.

<3>
On the pragmatic level, I'd agree with Chris that our "solipsist" world of experience is the beginning and the end of any exploration -- the inescapable context. Science itself, the mental activity of scientists, is experiential, as is philosophy, football or growing carrots. The observables science works with, are confined to the indivisible observer-observed unitary system.

<4>
Observer independent reality. From within the observer-observed experience, there are good reasons to assume that there must be an observer independent reality -- planet earth before we got here, the moon when nobody looks at it etc. But this observer independent reality can only be understood, translated in terms of how it looks-like in our world of experience, or what we derive from it by experimentation and theory. Then still there is this big "GAP", for instance between EM wavelengths that can be observed to enter the eye and hit the retina, subsequent nerve pulses that travel to the brain, further processing -- et voila; the experience 'blue', the rabbit out of the magic hat. There is however no way to find "the ontological ingredients of blue" in whatever one observes, for the same "cat chasing its own tail" reason.

<5>
Input-process-output. The cat-chasing-its-own-tail could also be seen as an effect in the "input-process-output" context. The "Input-process" part is that what happens "before" there is the output of a conscious moment of "world-experience". The world we see, the experiential output is thus a "projection" that "hides" as it were the true nature of its own input and "mind-brain processes" that lead towards the output of world-experience. We are thus kind of forced to understand input in terms of output, or translate output back in terms of input -- which is a paradoxical and thus redundant puzzle. But this problem also relates to the problem of "time" and change -- the question whether the past and future ACTUALLY do exist, or not. See <8>.

<6>
The "optical input delusion". When you look at your pc screen, you have the impression that what you see is the "input as-is". The same with the instrumental detection of EM wavelengths that travel from the surface of my pc screen to my eye. It is "as-if" you see what those EM waves "really are" before they enter your eye. I don't mean to say that there is not something like EM traveling between pc screen and eye, only that the nature of that "something" in the "input-phase" is "hidden" because it only manifests in the output "projection" in which this "input" can be seen. The cat-chasing-tail, can thus be understood as "trying to see the input in the output, simultaneously". This creates imo the phantom of the body-mind dichotomy.

<7>
Now the whole mind-matter issue becomes pretty easy. There is no need to find special tricks on a fundamental 'psycho-physical' level to derive experience from "content", i.e. to squeeze mind out of matter. The ontological ingredients (quality..) for the output "experience", are intrinsically present in our observer independent "physical" reality, "in every rain drop" to put it poetically, but "hidden" in the sense that "the seeing cannot see its past (input-process) that led to the present seeing". Probably because that past defacto does not exist (is not available):

<8>
Some free speculation about past-present-future. My assumption here; past and future events/moments, do not exist. Yet there is change. When changed "now-moments" are recorded on a tape, or projected on a timeline, one can project a past and future relative to a chosen now-moment. This gives the illusion that the past and the future are actualities. But they are not real -- only the now-moments change, transform. The "replay" of a past event by memory in the brain, is itself a new, unique now-moment in the overall movement of change. (The totality might be seen as one timeless "changing memory"?) When "experience as output" is seen in such a timeless context, where past and future are simply no actual REALITIES, then the "input" side might also been seen as simply non-existent ("anymore"). Then what do I see looking at my pc screen?

<9>
Indivisibility and wholeness. The concept of indivisibility applies to the "experienced" physical reality (what is observed by the observer), as well as to the assumed observer independent reality, and to the bigger reality that includes all of these. The wholeness of experience specifically means that it cannot reduce itself to content, for cat-chasing-tail reasons, and that it can neither be understood as some magic effect of truly separated and independently existing entities that bounce like ping-pong balls in the middle of nowhere. Wholeness of experience means then, that subject-object (observer-observed), are actually one unitary, indivisible movement, "one package".

<10>
The self in the solipsystem. Despite all the above (more or less logic, I hope) arguments, there is the sense of a centeredness of something like a self ("I") in the middle of its world of experience. Since it is, to me, non-sensical "to observe my own consciousness" because it is not an observable, then what is this self that feels, or projects itself as a cameraman behind a camera? I doubt that the self is anything at all, or it is something like a virtual pilot in an empty cybernetically automated but intelligent cockpit of a 747. Without language, self-referential thought, I can't think of any self or duality to exist. That "I" am thinking all this, creates of course trouble again .. :-)

[CEO, SE Man. Dir. of Mind-vs-Matter Consultancies Ltd.

I have a background in software engineering (1990). I did many other jobs though, varying from working in the field of soil mechanics to cab driving, and being housefather in between when wife worked fulltime as a systems engineer. My interest in philosophy and consciousness (and also psychology) springs from very early age. My first serious reading was at age 14 when I read most books of Erich Fromm. Usually I just pick up core ideas and questions in philosophy or philosophy related science, and I like to keep it "simple", if possible. I'm also interested in oriental philosophy, or "state of mind" if one could call it that, specifically J.Krishnamurti and U.G. Krishnamurti, who have been of great influence on my thinking. Just thought to give you this bit of background information.

[Jan Pieter Verhey
e-mail <jverhey@gyral.com>]