OK, I am not going to focus here on creating a model of reflection-that's on the backburner for now.

Instead, I want to comment on one of the underlying sources of motivation for this blog: the relation between the physiological structure of the body and lived, embodied experience.

Here I'm just going to skip any kind of introduction and dive right into the heart of the matter: What is the relation between conscious experience and the (dynamic) structure of the body?

There certainly IS a relation, that much is undeniable.  It's not as if the model of our body bears no decipherable relation to our conscious experience.  On the contrary, our model of the body has eyes that relate to our vision, ears that relate to our hearing, etc.  Furthermore, these things are not just isolated, but instead interconnected by nerve cells in the brain.  This last bit can account for the coordination between our different senses.  Already it's clear that there is a relation between our body and our experience-a relation that makes sense in at least some respects.

All of this is slightly tongue in cheek, of course.  Is it even reasonable to assume that an embodied species could make a model of its body that could not meaningfully correspond to experience?  How could a model that didn't correspond even come into expstence.  Is it possible to imagine a creature that had a body, yet could not even make the slightest steps towards understanding the relation between their body and their experience?  

Before things get out of hand we should take a moment to ask ourselves: Does our model of our body make sense of our experience to any real extent?  Take vision for instance.  Our model makes sense of vision to the extent that it models our eyes as light receptive organs.  To that end, the model helps us understand vision as something that results from the eyes' sensativity to light and its connection to the rest of the nervous system.  Yet at first glimpse that says nothing of experience.  Rather, it commits the homuncular fallacy.  We accept a model of how the eyes works that just pushes the problem of visual experience further back into the brain.

The incredibly ambitious point that I'm getting to is this:  What kind of model could possibly account for experience?  I mean a model that one could read about and comprehend relatively easily that would make lived experience make sense in much the same way that evolutionary adaptation makes sense of life on earth (but not necessarily lived experience).  

Already I've shown the insufficiency of explaining, e.g., visual experience by focusing on just the visual system.  That approach could generate a research program that studied the visual system in great detail, and the end result would be an account of a biological mechanism that was receptive to changing light patterns in such a way that the patterns received on a sensor (the retina) would be somehow deconstructed and give way to patterns of neuron firing.   That tells us a lot about the design of an optical sensor.  It tells us nothing about visual experience-well, maybe something about how we may come to connect meaning to specific things in our visual field.  

Still, it's obvious what's missing:  We can explain how we are able to do certain visual tasks-e.g., how we can recognize, categorize, act, etc.   In fact, all life processes viewed from the third person perspective are comprehensible-certainly not in detail, but at least theoretically.  But there's always that missing crucial ingredient-experience.  What is it about all of these things that causes experience?  In the next post I will attempt to address this with a thought experiment...