I'm saying that subjective experience IS localness.
The thing is... Physics doesn't explain why local realism in the first place. It's literally one of the assumptions physics itself is based on, just the rule "things happen in places" means "the report of a thing happening in a place will be attached to a place about which it happens, even if the thing in the place is "this thing in the place "five seconds ago"".
Asking why beyond that is like asking why does the universe exist; it just does, regardless of how or why.
Regardless of how or why, locality is a thing, and the mind as we understand it is a product of that.
From this perspective that mind is the product of interactions having "localness", though, you can imagine how ridiculous I think proposing a non-local mind would be; that which doesn't localize cannot be a mind in the first place since localization creates minds.
I appreciate the clarification—it helps to see where you’re drawing the line. But here’s the problem: you’re treating subjective experience and localness as equivalent, yet offering no reason why localness—as defined in physics—should entail first-person awareness. You’re asserting an identity, but the identity itself is the very thing under debate.
Saying that “subjective experience is localness” doesn’t explain anything—it just relabels the phenomenon and treats that relabeling as if it were resolution. It’s akin to saying “mass is curvature,” but in physics that only works because it leads to testable predictions and a deeper explanatory structure. Your move doesn’t do that—it just shifts the mystery sideways.
Then you say, “Physics doesn’t explain why local realism exists—it just assumes it.” And you’re absolutely right. But that undercuts your own argument. If localness is a primitive assumption in your framework, then it can’t also be the explanation for consciousness. That would be like saying “time explains motion” because physics assumes time. It’s not wrong, but it’s not explanatory either—it’s a framework, not a derivation.
You compare asking why localness gives rise to experience to asking “why does the universe exist?”—as if both are brute facts. But here’s the difference: when people ask “why is there something rather than nothing,” they’re probing the limits of metaphysics. When I ask why spatial interactions entail subjective experience, I’m asking for an ontological bridge between causal structure and conscious presence. That’s not a metaphysical dead-end—it’s the central question in philosophy of mind.
If your position is that we must accept that localness simply is experience, full stop—fine. But then you’re making a metaphysical assertion, just as idealists do. You’re choosing spatiotemporal structure as your primitive and trying to squeeze mind out of it, while idealism chooses mind as the primitive and treats spatiotemporal structure as its appearance.
Kastrup would say: localization is how dissociated mental processes look from the outside. Seager points out that structure tells us what things do, not what they feel like from the inside—and that the entire edifice of physics is blind to intrinsic character. Subjectivity doesn’t just happen when you label a process “local.”
So again: why should any system, just by having “localness,” suddenly acquire a point-of-view? Why doesn’t the universe remain a perfectly functional but utterly unconscious machine?
Until that’s answered, asserting that “localness is experience” isn’t resolving the problem—it’s renaming it.
NHC
When you have something interesting to say let me know.