@Pharoah
A study that I believe could be a reference for your work:
Plants Can’t Talk. But Some Fruits Say ‘Eat Me’ to Animals.
"For more than a century, biologists have wondered why fruits from closely-related plants have such different appearances, and how animals know which ones to eat.
The prevailing hypothesis has been that animals could have influenced fruit traits — like shape, location on a tree, presentation on a branch or odor and color — through natural selection. The easier it is for fruit-eaters to identify ripe fruits, the better the chance for both to survive. The animal eats, and the parent plant reproduces — by using the animals as gardeners — without lifting a root.
In a similar way, many flowers tailor their petal shape, color, texture or nectar’s scent or flavor to attract often a single pollinating species. Scientists accept that these flower traits could result from coevolution, because the relationships are so specific."
The problem--as always--is explaining what work the objective properties do (EM wavelengths, molecules, optic nerves, neurons, etc.) and what work subjective properties/qualities might do (colors, smells, tastes, etc.). How these properties are related, etc.
@smcder
So it occurred to me that the MBP (or paradox, perhaps) is related to other
paradoxes that arise from self-reference. I haven't found any mainstream discussions of this idea, but have stumbled on a few pieces so far.
WHY THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM
(
@Pharoah The first one actually has a section that seems to really capture some of the ideas you have in HCT. )
"Phenomenal qualities that emerge in experience are like the intelligible meanings that emerge through the babble of spoken syllables or the squiqqles on a page. For example, viewed this way, pain can be understood to have its specific experiential quality because of its particular significance to the organism as information about the state of its tissues. As William James observed, pain can only “hurt,” since it is a recognition of tissue damage. Sugar must taste “sweet” because sweetness is a cognitive judgment about the nutritive value of sugar molecules.
Ultimately, one would like to understand why the sky looks blue, trees green, and blood red—that is, why we have the subjective experiences we do in response to light of a certain wavelengths. Like the meaning of pain or pleasure, this sort of explanation must go beyond the functioning of causal systems, beyond third-person description, to include the role of semantic systems as well, from their own point of view as agents in the world. It includes the evolutionary advantages of particular intentional connections—which ride on causal connections—evolved within the extended system of brain, body, and world. The very nature of intentionality takes us beyond the science of passive matter and artificially isolated systems.
Whatever the details, such explanation can only be based on the reasonable assumption that cognition is neither entirely determined by a world of external causes, nor entirely by the organism's internal symbolic connections and conventions. It is rather an interaction in which organism and environment meet to contribute to the creation of experience, meaning, and behavior.
The Incomplete Self: Gödel and The Brain – Epoché (ἐποχή)
"We typically think of consciousness in terms of what the brain does. This is logical because a functioning brain is a precondition for consciousness. Strangely, however, a century of neurobiological work have not brought us closer to understanding what consciousness is or how it relates to the brain (Michael O’Shea
The Brain, A Very Short Introduction, 2005). This may be a clue that the brain does not give rise to consciousness in the same sense as when a machine churns out a product. Rather, as I will here argue, we should perhaps conceive of consciousness as a negative phenomenon, as something that arises from what the brain is specifically
unable to do.
Namely, as a self-referential computational system, the brain is unable to completely and independently represent its own states within itself. What this means is that its activity will always have a dimension that is irreducible and hence indivisible and unitary, which in turn corresponds to the conscious self." ...
There is an important analogy between Gödel’s discovery of incompleteness of consistent formal systems and the emergence of consciousness within the brain. Just as self-reference reveals that formal, consistent mathematical systems always contain intrinsic true statements about those very systems that are unprovable within them and are hence incompletely reducible to the systems’ other operations,
conscious experience arises as the brain represents its own states within itself while not being completely reducible to those states. The experience of a brain state is never identical to the brain state. It is always more.
@smcder, I wondered if you would be willing and able to dig anything up?