R1. Rigor paradigmatis

Unfortunately, many of the commentators failed to grasp the paradigmatic nature of the proposal and restated their own paradigmatic assumptions as if they were plain fact, thus committing the error of petitio principii, assuming from the outset that which is to be proven. Booth complains that it is "foolish" to look for consciousness among the brain cells. I contend that it is foolish to look for it anywhere else but in the brain! As in most paradigmatic debates, one man's "foolish" is another man's "obvious."

But Booth says not a word about the epistemological difficulties, which were discussed at length in the target article, of the view that he defends. If the experience of a red surface, for example, is located anywhere else but in the brain, then it is a spatial structure that exists, but it does not exist in any space known to science. This makes Booth's hypothesis a religious or spiritual theory, because the experienced surface is in principle beyond detection by scientific means, and therefore it is a theory that is impossible to disprove.

It's no good trying to dismiss the structure of consciousness in a trick of grammar, as Booth proposes, by claiming that the spatial structure of experience is a "seeming" rather than something real. That objection was addressed in the target article with the observation that visual consciousness has an information content, and information cannot exist independent of an actual physical mechanism or substrate in which it is registered. Booth seems to think that simply stating his own paradigmatic hypothesis as if it were plain fact ("We are not looking at a world inside our minds; we are . . . seeing the colour of the patch out there.") is an adequate response to the hypothesis that what we are seeing really is in our brain.