Richard, at which step is the brain malfunction: the step where I think I see colors, or the step where I think there are no colors in physics, or the step where I draw the logical conclusion?

Consider a community of intelligent agents whose eyes have the following flaw: there is an area of the retina of the eye where there are no photodetectors, with the result that the visual field experienced by an agent contains a black spot somewhere near the center of the field. The human eye has exactly such a flaw (where the optic nerve originates) but the human brain removes the existence of the flaw from the higher awareness of the individual. In contrast to the human case, suppose our hypothetical intelligent agents remain aware of the flaw (or can become aware of it whenever they choose to do so).

Suppose further that one day one of these agents, named Mitchell, addresses the physicists of the community as follows:

Yo, physicists! Although physics is supposed to be the study of fundamental reality, your account of fundamental reality neglects to account for the black disk that has contrived somehow to remain in front of my eyes for my entire life.

Clearly, your physical model needs to be revised to include the black disk. For example, unless the black disk is massless, momentum is not always conserved like your current physical model says it is. But a massless black disks presents problems, too. Research is needed to incorporate massless black disks into a coherent account of reality -- unless of course you decide instead to remove from your physical model the law of the conservation of momentum.

A physicist named Dick replies,

There is a reductionist explanation for the black disk that does not require a revision of our physical model. Here, let me lay it out for you. My model of reality includes my self. In other words, the model consists an agent (my self) and an environment. (Reality contains agents other than my self, but we will not be needing that fact today.) Moreover, the agent maintains a model of the environment. So, to review, in my model of reality, reality contains an agent which in turn contains a model of its environment. Let us appeal to the computer scientist's notion of state. The agent's model contains quite a bit of state. Part of that state is what we might call a low-level representation of the information coming from the environment through the eyes.

This low-level representation takes the form of a two-dimensional array, which we might call the visual field. Near the center of the two-dimensional representation is a blank area, a black area or what appears to be a representation of a black disk. However, the agent containing the low-level representation is an educated agent. It has been to college. It knows about the part of its retina where there are no photoreceptors. Consequently, the agent's highest-level representation of its environment does not include a black disk that contrives somehow always to remain near the center of where the agent is looking becuase it has properly accounted for other evidence (e.g., knowledge of the anatomy of its eye) that overrides the evidence of the low-level representation of the black disk.

Let me stop here, Mitchell, and ask you to confirm that yes, the account given by the fictional intelligent agent Dick is a satisfactory account of the black disk and is a satisfactory answer to the fictional Mitchell.

Second, let me ask you to confirm, please, that yes, for the fictional Mitchell to ask Dick, "At what stage do the quarks, photons, etc, of your physical model turn into a massless or momentum-conservation-violating black disk?" reveals a confusion between representation of reality and reality -- that is, between map and territory?

Jokes about the parts of a symphony aside

I am a little discouraged by your framing it as a joke. You made an argument about consciousness, then I pointed out that the same argument holds for symphonic music. I sincerely, non-jokingly did not understand what is different about consciousness that made your argument apply there, but not apply to symphonic music.

But anyway, you expanded your argument as follows:

I have my conscious experience of the world, which is some complicated mixture of sensations, diverse conceptual positing of objects and situations, and private intentionality . . . Then, I have my physical model of the world, which might be atoms in space, or amplitudes in configuration space, and I seek to identify the experience above with some subset of the posited physical world. On both sides of the equation we have things in relation to each other, so we need a mapping not just between things but between relations.

So my proposition is that it is extremely problematic to identify the constituting relations of consciousness - the relations between its parts at the level of experience - with spatial relations. The constituting relations of consciousness are something like: subjective spatiality, subjective simultaneity, gestalt unification of sensations into a sensory form, conceptual association of posited properties with sensory gestalts, logical and other conjunctions of things as the compound objects of thoughts

Let me ask you this: suppose I show you a computer program with rich, complex non-spatial relationships between elements of the computer program. Would you consider that evidence of the poverty and the unsatisfactoriness of our current physical model?

If you answer no, please explain what it is about you at the level of physical law that is intrinsically different from a computer program.