Hi Edwin,
I found much to like about your essay. Your notion that mathematical laws are essentially projections upon the world, rather than discoveries within it, is close to some of my own thinking---in fact, I believe that many problems, especially in the explanation of consciousness, stem from the mismatch between mathematical---and ultimately, computational---explanation, and the non-computational world. Thus, there appear to be these mysterious, ineffable, inexplicable, subjective things which there's just no accounting for; but they're ultimately perfectly ordinary parts of the world that appear mysterious only if viewed under the aegis of a mistaken explanatory paradigm.
But I have some more trouble with the notion of a 'consciousness field'. The idea has been proposed before, maybe most notably by Benjamin Libet (he of the alleged 'no free will'-experiments), but I simply don't see how to make it work.
First of all, it seems a bit of a non-explanation to me: like panpsychism, we just postulate that there's conscious 'stuff' that somehow adheres to normal matter. Now, that may be how things actually work, but to me, it would be sort of a disappointment---essentially, we'd be left with an unreducible mystery, a brute fact about the world we'd merely have to accept. But then again, nature is under no obligation to work in a way I'd find satisfying (again something physicists all too often appear to presume)...
But there's also more quantitative questions about the proposal. If it's supposed to be, at least in some aspect, a physical field, then it must interact with other physical fields. Now, you claim that the consciousness field is essentially classical; do you also believe that the other physical fields are?
If they are not, then coupling a classical field to quantum fields is something that's very hard to do---indeed, the general belief is that it's impossible, which is a major motivation for the search of a quantum theory of gravity. But if that then means that your consciousness field ought to likewise be quantum, it's hard to square with the experimental evidence: due to crossing symmetry, any field that interacts with ordinary matter can also be produced by ordinary matter, meaning that evidence of your field ought to be discoverable in particle accelerators; and if it's to interact appreciably, then it ought to have been found long ago.
And otherwise, if the standard model fields are supposed to be classical underneath it all, there's a heavy empirical burden to meet---writing down a classical theory able to explain all of the observed phenomena is not an easy feat. I think the best one might be able to do is something like Nelson's stochastic theory, or Bohmian mechanics; neither of which I would exactly call 'classical' (and neither of which, I think, has a consistent, fully relativistic formulation).
In short, you kind of want the best of both worlds of both dualism and monism: a special sort of stuff able to carry conscious properties (dualism), yet a unified framework for everything to interact (monism). That's a good idea on the fact of it, but I'm not sure it's really any less problematic than either of the traditional approaches on their own.
That said, I applaud your empirical spirit in this: too many people trying to explain the mind have never experimented with it even a bit.
