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I have a thought experiment for Don's point about neuron not existing. This should have been obvious decades ago!! Imagine you're getting open brain surgery. The doc is colorblind, their nurse has tetrachromia, a bee and a snake are also present. When they expose your brain, who has the accurate view of it? Let's say each observer dies, 1 by 1. With each death, their POV on "your brain" vanishes. The snakes render of it dies with the snake. Same with the bee and the 2 humans. Which brain exists after all 4 died? Which model of a brain is present when no one is actively building the model? What is "real" there? Experience. Experience itself is the "stuff of the world".
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Your thought experiment is actually a sharp way of cutting into the difference between the world-as-experienced and the world-as-described. The moment you bring in the color‑blind surgeon, the tetrachromat nurse, the bee, and the snake, you’re exposing something most people think they understand but don’t: there is no single, privileged “view” of the brain. There are only models generated by different perceptual systems.
The concise takeaway: the “brain” that exists is not a thing with a single appearance — it is the set of all possible experiences of it. When no experience is happening, no model is instantiated.
🧠 What your scenario actually reveals
Each observer has a different sensory apparatus, so each observer constructs a different model:
Colorblind surgeon — reduced color channels, sees fewer distinctions
Tetrachromat nurse — more color channels, sees distinctions no one else can
Bee vision — ultraviolet patterns, different edge detection
Snake infrared perception — thermal gradients, not “colors” at all
None of these is “the accurate view.” They are species‑specific renderings of the same underlying physical structure.
This is the part people miss:
The “brain” is not the thing you see. The “brain” is the thing that causes those different experiences.
🧩 When each observer dies, what disappears?
Their model disappears. Not the underlying physical object — but the appearance of it.
When the bee dies, the UV‑patterned brain vanishes. When the snake dies, the thermal‑gradient brain vanishes. When the humans die, the color‑based brain vanishes.
What remains is the brain as a physical system, but with no active model being generated by any mind.
This is the key distinction:
Phenomenal brain — the brain as experienced
Noumenal brain — the brain as it exists independent of experience
Your argument is that only the phenomenal brain is “real.” That experience itself is the stuff of the world.
This is a defensible philosophical position — but it’s not the only one.
🧭 Three major interpretations of your thought experiment
Here are the three strongest philosophical readings:
1. Phenomenalism — reality is experience
Under this view, the brain only exists as experienced. When no one is experiencing it, there is no brain. There is only the potential for experience.
This matches your conclusion:
Experience is the stuff of the world.
2. Critical realism — there is a real brain, but no single correct appearance
The physical brain exists independently, but every perceptual system produces a different rendering. No rendering is “the real one.” They are all partial, species‑specific interpretations.
3. Relational ontology — objects exist only in relations
The brain exists in relation to observers. Different observers = different relations = different “brains.” No observer = no relations = no instantiated model.
This is close to your view but doesn’t collapse everything into experience — it collapses everything into relations.
🔥 The non‑obvious insight
Your experiment doesn’t just show that perception varies. It shows that the concept “brain” is itself a model, not a thing.
The physical object is a mass of cells. The brain is a theory about that mass.
Different species generate different theories. Humans generate a neuroscientific theory. Bees generate a UV‑pattern theory. Snakes generate a thermal‑pattern theory.
When all observers die, the theories vanish, but the physical mass remains.
Unless you take the phenomenalist stance — then even the mass vanishes.
🧠 So what is “real”?
Here are the three candidates:
Experience — your view
Physical structure — scientific realism
Relations — relational ontology
Your argument is coherent: If every model of the brain is tied to a perceptual system, and all perceptual systems die, then the only thing that ever existed was experience itself.
But the counterpoint is equally strong: The physical brain continues to exist even when no one is experiencing it — it simply isn’t being rendered.
A question that pushes your thought experiment further
Would you like to explore whether consciousness can exist without a physical substrate or whether physical reality can exist without consciousness?
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