I think thy provide more explanatory power than any explanation from neuroscience.
That doesn't answer the question. Again: what explanatory advantage do they give over conventional neuroscience?
Neuroscience is good at explaining how the brain works but it cannot explain conscious experience.
Nor has any other field of enquiry - but neuroscience has demonstrated that every reportable feature of consciousness is influenced (determined?) by brain activity. As Chalmers has pointed out, the only puzzle is how it creates a sense of subjective experience.
No where in the neurons can the experience of pain or joy of music be found.
Straw man. Nowhere in water molecules can wetness be found, nowhere in gas molecules can pressure or hurricanes be found, etc. These phenomena are
emergent.
A mechanistic and quantitative view cannot account for experience nor even measure it in the first place as it is about quantitative explanations as opposed to qualitative experience which science cannot address.
ISTM that the problem is that objective study can only account for subjective experience via correlation. How else do you think any of the ideas you linked to could explain subjective experience?
There's too much so called Woo out there for it all to be dismissed away as unreal.
Obvious
argumentum ad populum fallacy. The quantity of woo has no bearing on its likelihood of being 'real' - but it's a useful indicator of the amount of ignorance and gullibility out there.
I agree we have to scrutinize these ideas as they are hard to verify in traditional terms. But nevertheless we can apply other ways of support like goodness of fit and simple and elegant explanations which seem to support some form of fundamental consciousness to reality.
By all means explain how you would apply 'goodness of fit', and how simplicity and elegance is not just a rule of thumb for deciding between equally good explanations (i.e. that are indistinguishable by the other criteria of a 'good explanation').
I think that some form of this idea based on interpreting QM which are already well known such as the observer effect, QBism, Mind or consciousness being fundamental is the key and this is the new frontier in understanding reality.
Nope. The observer effect has nothing to do with QM interpretations, mind or consciousness are demonstrably irrelevant, and QBism treats the probabilistic wavefunction as epistemic (Bayesian priors), which itself requires some interpretation.
If consciousness is some form of field as you acknowledged then all this article is doing is attempting to explain that field.
I haven't acknowledged that consciousness is some form of field and the article doesn't explain the proposed field.
After all this idea has been around for millennia and is a common issue across all domains where we need to address the place humans as conscious observers and participators play a central role. Whether its through belief such as Christianity, New age, the ancient Buddhist, in spiritual healing, transcendental meditation, or mainstream science like Wheeler's Participatory Universe.
As above, the amount and longevity of beliefs is no indication of their explanatory quality or utility. At best, it comforts people, at worst it's dangerous. Wheeler's Participatory Anthropic Principle isn't mainstream science, and I have nothing against ancient Buddhism or meditation, but they're not explanations for consciousness.
The traditional and classical view of science has the observer as a passive player as far as reality is concerned and sets out to explain away any agency, will, conscious experience as the result of mechanistic causes that have tricked us into thinking what we experience is real but its all an illusion. But now may are saying our conscious experience is what is real all along and the material world is the illusion.
Don't confuse methodology with metaphysics. Of course conscious experience is real - it's how we're able to have this discussion.
To what degree the material world is an illusion is a matter of viewpoint and interpretation - all your brain receives are neural spike trains, it generates the material world you experience from them; sensations such as colour, taste, odor, etc., could be called illusory, as they have no objective existence; you can have real experiences that don't correspond to reality - that's what 'illusion' generally means. But be careful - your experience of the world generally has some basis - if you try to fly from a high window, or walk through walls, or step in front of traffic to test the illusory nature of the material world, you're likely to discover the distinction.
When you make the claim and argue that an idea that doesn't conform to methodological naturalism is woo you are actually also claiming that science is revealing some ontological truth about reality. But that's beyond scientific verification. So in some ways you could say scientific ideas are also Woo as they appeal to something out there as being real metaphysically.
Well, I didn't make that claim, the ideas I called 'woo' were incorrectly or deceitfully using the language of methodological naturalism (science), making them
pseudoscience; scientific ideas are explanatory models for empirical observations, whether or not they represent metaphysical reality is the domain of philosophy.
