Despite substantial efforts by many researchers, we still have no scientific theory of how brain activity can create, or be, con-scious experience. This is troubling, since we have a large body of correlations between brain activity and consciousness, correlations normally assumed to entail that brain activity creates conscious experience. Here I explore a solution to the mind-body problem that starts with the converse assumption: these correlations arise because consciousness creates brain activity, and indeed creates all objects and properties of the physical world. To this end, I develop two theses. The multimodal user interface theory of perception states that perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world. Conscious realism states that the objective world consists of conscious agents and their experiences; these can be mathematically modeled and em-pirically explored in the normal scientific manner.
CITATION STYLE
Smith, D. L. (1999). Freud and the Mind-Body Problem (pp. 20–32). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1611-6_4
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.