Podcast with Kevin O'Regan on consciousness and qualia

What if consciousness isn't generated by the brain at all, but is a way of describing how organisms interact with the world? Kevin O'Regan presents a radical sensorimotor theory that dissolves the hard problem of consciousness using the same conceptual trick that demystified life itself.

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O'Regan argues that searching for neural correlates of consciousness leads to an infinite regress: even if we found the exact neurons responsible for the feel of redness, we could always ask what makes those neurons produce red rather than green. His solution borrows from the history of biology, where vitalism was abandoned once scientists recognized that life is not a substance but a description of how organisms interact with their environment. Similarly, he proposes that feel is not something generated inside the brain but a characterization of the sensorimotor laws governing an organism's engagement with the world.

The interview systematically addresses the three classical mysteries of qualia. Ineffability arises naturally because the low-level sensorimotor details constituting a feel are cognitively inaccessible, much like a whistler cannot describe their tongue position. The structure of feels, why red resembles pink more than green, falls out of the objective, measurable differences in sensorimotor laws governing interactions with colored surfaces. And sensory presence, the reason vision feels different from proprioception, relates to the richness and bodily engagement of the sensorimotor contingencies involved.

O'Regan and interviewer Paul Verschure probe the relationship between this framework and Gibson's affordances, exploring whether qualia might be understood as the subjective dimension of affordance relationships. They examine how the sensorimotor approach partially overcomes interpersonal ineffability by grounding feel in observable behavior, and whether contortionists might experience richer tactile qualia due to finer motor control. The discussion culminates in the provocative claim that a sufficiently complex robot like the Terminator would genuinely feel pain, not because of any special ingredient, but because it would interact with the world in the ways we call feeling.