Tonneau, F (2004). Consciousness outside the head. Behavior and Philosophy, 32, 97-123
[Abstract]Brain-centered theories of consciousness seem to face insuperable difficulties. While some philosophers now doubt that the hard problem of consciousness will ever be solved, others call for radically new approaches to conscious experience. In this article I resurrect a largely forgotten approach to consciousness known as neorealism. According to neorealism, consciousness is merely a part, or cross-section, of the environment. Neorealism implies that all conscious experiences, veridical or otherwise, exist outside of the brain and are wholly independent of being perceived or not; nonveridical perceptions of the environment over an arbitrarily short period of time are supposed to be objective constituents of the environment over a more extended time scale. I argue here that neorealism fares at least as well as brain-centered theories of consciousness on a number of fundamental issues. On one fundamental issue—the nature of the relation between veridical and nonveridical perceptions—neorealism outperforms its competitors.
[Citing Place (1956)]  
Citing Place (1956) in context (citations start with an asterisk *):
* Asked to remember what my grandmother looks like (she lives thousands of miles from me), I can evoke an image of her in my mind — an image that shares at least some of the perceptible features of my grandmother, such as the shape of her hands or the color of her eyes. Not all of her features are present (the mental image is much vaguer), but at least some are. Yet no process in my head could have these features. If consciousness is a brain process (Place, 1956), how could my conscious experience of my grandmother have these features — such as the color of her eyes — that no brain process could have?
Section The Argument from Illusion
* The suggestions of Place (1956) and Smart (1959) on brain states, in particular, will not help. Place (1956) and Smart (1959) suggested that when we report the mental image of an environmental entity X, we just report that we are in a brain state similar to the brain state we are in when we actually perceive X. The problem for the internal view, however, is not to find a brain state with the features of another brain state, even “the brain state we are in when we actually perceive X,” for we are not aware of the actual features of these brain states, as Smart himself noted (1959, p. 150). The problem for the internal view is instead to find a brain state with the perceptible features of my experience of X (the shape of my grandmother’s hands, for example), but no brain state has such features.