A Symbolically Clear Diagnosis of the Fault

This post is a response to an argument for irreducibility that relies on an equivocation between an experience and a description of an experience. Making this explicit exposes the failure.

A Summary of the Original Argument:

1. The Entities Involved

Let denote a conscious experience.
Let denote the neural realization of that experience.
Let denote a description or theoretical representation of the identity or correlation between and .
Let denote a meta-state in which the agent experiences or entertains that description.

The proponent’s regress expands this:

They infer that because any description leaves an additional experiential remainder, cannot be identical to .

2. Why This Inference Fails

The physicalist reduction does not claim that:

Rather, it claims something like:

or at least (supervenes on , using for supervenience).

Thus the actual target of reduction is the pair latex[/latex], not the meta-states that refer to it. The regress merely shows that descriptions differ from what they describe, which is trivial and harmless.

Formally:

1. The regress observes that for any , there exists an such that:
2. It mistakenly infers that therefore:

But the conclusion only follows if one inserts a hidden premise:

That premise is not argued for; it is simply assumed. Hence the argument is circular.

3. Core Category Error

The flawed reasoning structure is:

1. 
2. Conclude such that constitutes the essence of .

But showing that and are distinct does not entail:

Because the existence of iterated representations is a fact about cognition:

not a fact about ontology:

The regress shows representational open-endedness, not metaphysical dualism.

4. The Epistemic-Metaphysical Conflation

The supplementary claim is that neural decoding requires first-person reports. Symbolically:

Let be subject reports.
Let be neural measurements.
Scientific mapping proceeds via:

The argument infers:

depends on , therefore .

This implicitly uses:

This inference is invalid. Methodological dependence does not imply metaphysical primacy. We also rely on thermometers to access temperature, but that does not imply that temperature is irreducible to kinetic energy.

5. The Valid Alternative Interpretation

A physicalist reading can simply assert:

and

and are further neural states:

This interpretation absorbs the regress:

for arbitrarily large , with no metaphysical residue required. The infinite representational tower is simply more neural dynamics, not evidence of ontological dualism.

6. Compact Diagnosis

The irreducibility argument equivocates between:

• identity of with at the ontological level
versus
• identity of with a description at the representational level.

Once this distinction is made explicit in symbols, the regress collapses into a trivial observation about the difference between a system and any finite description of it. It does not establish that .