A brain scan can find every neuron that sees red, and none of the red.
Suppose a neuroscientist scans your brain while you look at a red apple. She can find the neurons that fire, measure their timing, even tell from the scan which color you are seeing. What she cannot find anywhere in the data is the red itself. Why does consciousness look, from the inside, so unlike anything we can observe from the outside?
One answer is that experience is a separate substance no scan will ever capture; another is that there is nothing to explain. A proposal discussed on Astral Codex Ten takes a third route: the inside really is different, and the difference lies in how a thought is built.
The inside of a thought
Neural oscillations are how the brain computes. When a group of neurons fires together in a synchronized rhythm, the rhythm creates a boundary. Spikes inside the oscillation carry information encoded in the timing of the rhythm itself, while spikes outside it carry information in a different format. Seeing the apple, on this account, is a rhythm forming among the neurons that represent it.
The model’s central claim follows: qualia are nothing but information processed internally, on a thought’s own information channel. The red is the apple-rhythm’s information seen from inside; the scientist sees only its outside, because the encoding is local to the oscillation. That is why experience can’t be communicated, and why it feels like yours: the oscillation that processes the red is the oscillation that experiences it.
Consciousness proper begins when the rhythm starts processing its own activity, so that it reflects itself. Many processes that know each other become one process that knows itself. Self-replication turned chemistry into biology; on this proposal, self-reflection turns neural activity into consciousness.
Why the problem feels hard
A thought that reflects on itself knows its own inside directly, and knows other thoughts only by their outside. It cannot easily notice that it, too, has an outside, so it feels categorically different from everything it observes. The observer cannot see its own outside.
It also misdescribes itself. All thinking compresses, so a thought modeling itself reaches for the simplest model available. It does not think “I am an oscillation in visual cortex.” It thinks “I am me, a person looking at an apple.” Several oscillations in different regions can each make that claim at once without noticing the contradiction, because each has access only to its own channel. When two of them merge, they mistake each other for themselves, and the merger feels like a single, unified self.
None of this solves the hard problem, and a skeptic can fairly call it another physicalist hand-wave. What it explains is why the problem feels hard: from within, one thought’s inability to reach another’s inside would look like a metaphysical gap. The question “why is there something it is like to be a thought?” has the same answer as “why can’t I see my own face without a mirror?” — it is a structural constraint, not a metaphysical one.
If the model is right, you are not one consciousness watching many thoughts. You are many thoughts, each claiming to be you. Watts said that “the observation and the observer are the same event,” and in oscillatory terms that is literal: the red and the one seeing it are the same synchronized firing. The scientist with the scan was looking at the one side of your thought that your thought can never see.
References:
- Consciousness as Recursive Reflections — Astral Codex Ten