An ontology is a theory about what it is that exists. I have to speak of "physical ontology" and not just of physics, because so many physicists take an anti-ontological or positivistic attitude, and say that physical theory just has to produce numbers which match the numbers coming from experiment; it doesn't have to be a theory about what it is that exists. And by standard physical ontology I mean one which is based on what Galileo called primary properties, possibly with some admixture of new concepts from contemporary mathematics, but definitely excluding the so-called secondary properties.

So a standard physical ontology may include time, space, and objects in space, and the objects will have size, shape, and location, and then they may have a variety of abstract quantitative properties on top of that, but they don't have color, sound, or any of those "feels" which get filed under qualia.

I don't know every last detail of how the experience of color is created by the interaction of light waves, eyes, and neurons, but I know that that's where it comes from.

Asking "where is the experienced color in the physical brain?" shows the hidden problem here . We know from experience that reality includes things that are actually green, namely certain parts of experiences. If we insist that everything is physical, then that means that experiences and their parts are also physical entities of some kind. If the actually green part of an experience is a physical entity, then there must be a physical entity which is actually green.

For the sake of further discussion, let us assume a physical ontology based on point-particles. These particles have the property of location - the property of always being at some point in space - and maybe they have a few other properties, like velocity, spin, and charge. An individual particle isn't actually green. What about two of them? The properties possessed by two of them are quantitative and logical conjunctions of the properties of individual particles - e.g. "location of center of mass" or "having a part at location x0 and another part at x1". We can even extend to counterfactual properties, e.g. "the property of flying apart if a heavy third particle were to fly past on a certain trajectory".

To accept that actual greenness still exists, but to argue against dualism, you need to show that actual greenness can be identified with some property like these. The problem is that that's a little absurd. It is exactly like saying that if you count through the natural numbers, all of the numbers after 5 x 10^37 are blue. The properties that are intrinsically available in standard physical ontology are much like arithmetic properties, but with a few additional "physical" predicates that can also enter into the definition.

I presume that most modern people don't consider linguistic behaviorism an adequate account of anything to do with consciousness. Linguistic behaviorism is where you say there are no "minds" or "psychological states", there are just bodies that speak. It's the classic case of accounting for experience by only accounting for what people say about experience.

Cognitive theories of consciousness are considered an advance on this because they introduce a causal model with highly structured internal states which have a structural similarity to conscious states. We see the capacity of neurons to encode information e.g. in spiking rates, we see that there are regions of cortex to which visual input is mapped point by point, and so we say, maybe the visual experience of a field of color is the same thing as a sheet of visual neurons spiking at different rates.

But I claim they can't be the same thing because of the ontological mismatch. A visual experience contains actual green, a sheet of neurons is a complicated bound state of a quadrillion atoms which nowhere contains actual green, though it may contain neurons exhibiting an averaged behavior which has a structural and causal role rather close to the structural and causal role played by actual greenness, as inferred from psychology and phenomenology.

Here I say there are two choices. Either you say that on top of the primary properties out of which standard physical ontology is built, there are secondary properties, like actual green, which are the building blocks of conscious experiences, and you say that the experiences dualistically accompany the causally isomorphic physical processes. Or you say that somewhere there is a physical object which is genuinely identical to the conscious experience - it is the experience - and you say that these neuronal sheets which behave like the parts of an experience still aren't the thing itself, they are just another stage in the processing of input (think of the many anatomical stages to the pathways that begin at the optic nerve and lead onward into the brain).

There are two peculiarities to this second option. First, haven't we already argued that the base properties available in physical ontology, considered either singly or in conjunction, just can't be identified with the constituent properties of conscious states? How does positing this new object help, if it is indeed a physical object? And second, doesn't it sound like a soul - something that's not a network of neurons, but a single thing; the single place where the whole experience is localized?

I propose to deal with the second peculiarity by employing a quantum ontology in which entanglement is seen as creating complex single objects (and not just correlated behaviors in several objects which remain ontologically distinct), and with the first peculiarity by saying that, yes, the properties which make up a conscious state are elementary physical properties, and noting that we know nothing about the intrinsic character of elementary physical properties, only their causal and structural relations to each other (so there's no reason why the elementary internal properties of an entangled system can't literally and directly be the qualia). I take the structure of a conscious state and say, that is the structure of some complex but elementary entity - not the structure of a collective behavior (as when we talk about the state of a neuron as "firing" or "not firing", a description which passes over the intricate microscopic detail of the exact detailed state).

The rationale of this move is that identifying the conscious state machine with a state machine based on averaged collective behaviors is really what leads to dualism. If we are instead dealing with the states of an entity which is complex but "fundamental", in the sense of being defined in terms of the bottom level of physical description (e.g. the Hilbert spaces of these entangled systems), then it's not a virtual machine.

Maybe that's the key concept in order to get this across to computer scientists: the idea is that consciousness is not a virtual state machine, it's a state machine at the "bottom level of implementation". If consciousness is a virtual state machine - so I argue - then you have dualism, because the states of the state machine of consciousness have to have a reality which the states of a virtual machine don't intrinsically have.

If you are just making a causal model of something, there's no necessity for the states of your model to correspond to anything more than averaged behaviors and averaged properties of the real system you're modeling. But consciousness isn't just a model or a posited concept, it is a thing in itself, a definite reality. States of consciousness must exist in the true ontology, they can't just be heuristic approximate concepts. So the choice comes down to: conscious states are dualistically correlated with the states of a virtual state machine, or conscious states are the physical states of some complex but elementary physical entity. I take the latter option and posit that it is some entangled subsystem of the brain with a large but finite number of elementary degrees of freedom. This would be the real physical locus of consciousness, the self, and you; it's the "Cartesian theater" where diverse sensory information all shows up within the same conscious experience, and it is the locus of conscious agency, the internally generated aspect of its state transitions being what we experience as will.

(That is, the experience of willing is awareness of a certain type of causality taking place. I'm not saying that the will is a quale; the will is just the self in its causal role, and there are "qualia of the will" which constitute the experience of having a will, and they result from reflective awareness of the self's causal role and causal power... Or at least, these are my private speculations. )

I'll guess that my prose got a little difficult again towards the end, but that's how it will be when we try to discuss consciousness in itself as an ontological entity. But hopefully the road towards the dilemma between dualism and quantum monism is a little clearer now.

Colours "exist" as a fact of perception. If you're looking for colours without perception, you've missed what normative usage of "colour" means. You've also committed a ton of compression fallacy, assuming that all possible definitions of "colour" do or should refer to the same ontological entity.

You've then covered your views in word salad; I would not attempt to write with such an appalling lack of clarity as you've wrapped your views in in this sequence, except for strictly literary purposes; certainly not if my intent were to inform.

You need to seriously consider the possibility that this sequence is getting such an overwhelmingly negative reaction because you're talking rubbish.