> As long as we think there are some unexplicable, non existent
>thing that some how abstractly "arises from" "hypercomplex
>relatedness" in some incomprehensible way or that red is something
>beyond our eyes, we will never discover what things fundamentally are
>really phenomenally like. In order to find consciousness, we must
>start looking in the right place and accept the fact that it is built
>out of something fundamentally and phenomenally real and
>understandable.
It might be that the discussion bogs down in different definitions for the
same words.
I'm assuming that `phenomenal' is being posited by contrast to `noumenal' -
that it denotes the inward experience of things outside consciousness, via
sensory registration and cognitive mapping of a conjectured world of
things-in-themselves.
Those noumenal things might be fields of force, or hosts of angels, or
computer lists in a higher-dimensional space... but for the terminology to
be useful, we assume with Kant that noumena are inaccessible, in their
suchness, to human awareness and apprehension.
So of course, on this usage, redness cannot be on the far side of our eyes.
It's an experience, a construct, a phenomenon. (The trouble with this
traditional philosophical usage is that it stumbles over the common usage
where `phenomenon' is taken to denote a bounded thing or activity in the
world. Pity about that.)
Damien Broderick