-AgreedBut I do have a suggestion to start afresh, because our convo is getting unwieldy and I'd like to try to keep it focussed - also to lose the bickery sneering commentary which is just irritating.
I'm still not quite sure what your position is regarding conscious experience. The gist of what I've picked up is you believe it's biological, and that describing the biological processes is as much of an explanation for conscious experience as science can or should offer.
-Well it not a matter of belief. Biological organisms with brains have the ability to experience consciously the world, their thoughts and feeling.
So its more of a matter of basic reasoning on observable facts than a faith based belief.
-I don't really understand what that means. Science has different disciplines capable to produce descriptive frameworks for different scales of reality. For example Newton's laws about the classical world are irrelevant and useless when we try to describe really small and really large scales.And that biology isn't reducible to physics, something new enters the universe with biological processes. If I've read you right?
The same is true for quantum mechanics and Relativity and their inability to describe classical phenomena meaningfully and in detail. So in order to describe properties, and causal relations in biological systems we need to use biology's theoretical and mathematical frameworks.
Or that conscious experience is an emergent/reducible property of certain biological processes (namely embodied brains). Or that conscious experience is a different 'something' produced by biological brains which isn't reducible to them.
-Conscious experiences are contingent to brain function. I am not sure that the subjective ability of an observers (to reduce a property to a specific mechanism) is helpful. A functioning brain is necessary and sufficient to explain the emergence of our conscious experience. We even can identify specific parts of the brain and their role in emergent mind properties.
Trying to reduce the emergent property to a specific feature of a lower process is like trying to explain why water can display such weird properties in all three different states while none of them follow from its lower level mechanisms. This is Nature!
-As I said above, I don't even know what that means!My position is that biological and chemical processes are emergent from/reducible to physics.
I find the following statement far more meaningful, because it removes the element of our subjective take or limits as observers.
"Biological and chemical processes emerge from complex structures that are the product of really basic physical properties(kinetic/energetic) governing the smaller scales of reality (QM and atomic scales). This is our basic scientific understanding (and current paradigm) on how classical structures and properties arise in our world.
-Science doesn't come up with "physicalists models". The physical position is the indefensible statement :""everything is physical".And that the physicalist model of what the world is made of and the forces which account for physical processes is the theoretical explanatory model which the scientific method has come up with to give an in principle full account of the world. What it's made of and what it does.
Science doesn't accept that. Our Scientific models are the product of our observations and studies of the available and quantifiable realm. The current scientific model verifies the Necessary and Sufficient role of the brain in the emergence of mind properties by establishing Strong Correlations between causal mechanisms in our brain and our mental states.
As I said in my previous posts, it is important to distinquish Physicalism from Methodological Naturalism (the philosophical backbone of science).
The first one is a metaphysical worldview, while the second is an Epistemic Acknowledgement of our limits in observations and verification of our hypotheses.
So if that physicalist model has no place for consciousness, wouldn't in principle have a way of predicting its emergence, then our usual scientific methodology and the explanatory model which was developed from it, looks incomplete or flawed. Which no amount of noting ever more detailed correlations can address.
- Again I don't know what that means (if that physicalist model has no place for consciousness). Science can predict and describe the quality of the emergence of conscious states and their content(as my links verify).
(Which no amount of noting ever more detailed correlations can address.) Again I don't really know what that means. Science can explain far more things about consciousness than philosophers admit or are aware of. Again my links provide evidence of our scientific progress.
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/neuro ... -explained
-Of course it has. We can quantify the quality and objectively decode the contents of conscious thoughts by reading brain patterns with fMRI scans.Furthermore, conscious experience doesn't have the sort of objectively observable and measurable qualities which the scientific toolkit relies on,
https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/news/news- ... ughts.html
Anel Seth presents the methodology capable to quantify the quality of our conscious states.
-Mind properties are contingent to brain function, so by observing the states of brain matter we can tell a lot about the emergent property, like by observing the structure of carbon molecules we can say many things about the emergent property of the material.which might suggest it is radically different type of stuff/property, and/or one which science is not able to fit into explanatory models which rely on being objectively observable/measurable.
That sounds more like an argument from ignorance and specifically from personal incredulity (modern Philosophy's ignorance of our scientific foundings). Consciousness has been declared mysterious without allowing any inputs from science.Which makes the problem of explaining it, potentially a paradigmatic one.
-Sure but in order for our discussion to be meaningful you will need to invest time on our scientific epistemology on the phenomenon because most of your claims ignore our current knowledge and the methods we use to study, quantify and apply our knowledge on real life applications.Does that look like a reasonable way to reset our discussion to you?