Consciousness, Space, and the Holographic Correspondence

Physicalists need to explain why consciousness seems to be incompatible with physics. This ‘seeming’ is attributed to psychological reasons by eliminativists and to conceptual confusion by nonreductive physicalists. However, as a pre-Socratic naturalist, I find the most satisfying possible solution to this ‘seeming’ to emerge from the ‘riches of physics’, that is, from discovering physical properties that are so different from ordinary physical properties that they seem incompatible with the physical. I also believe, with Stoljar, that the problem of consciousness is made up of a cluster of related problems. I argue that were the neural correlates of consciousness shown to be massively entangled, then the AdS/CFT ‘holographic correspondence (duality) principle’, applied to the brain, could solve so many problems in that cluster that, although very strange, this physical scenario should be taken seriously.