The problem is to identify the adaptive benefit of consciousness the relationship between the brain, behavior and consciousness has to be understood.
Nope. To identify the adaptive benefit of consciousness it is only necessary to show which behavioural features of consciousness are adaptive, and why. The relationship between the brain, behavior, and consciousness is important to discover, but that's the mechanism underlying the adaptive benefit.
This is tightly linked to the mind-body problem. To explain the evolution of consciousness we would need to solve the 'Hard problem'. So any claims about the evolution of consciousness at this stage are falsifiable.
If the claims are falsifiable, they can be falsified. That's good. The 'Hard problem' of consciousness is a technical problem, the final piece of the jigsaw. We don't need it for an effective theory of the evolution of consciousness. The phylogenetic evidence we have all points to that evolution; there is a growing literature on its adaptivity; as an evolutionarily recent trait, its developmental ontogeny will be reflected in evolutionarily recent changes in the brain.
The persistent problems are that, as a subjective and necessarily self-reported phenomenon, it is objectively ill-defined, and (consequently?) its observable characteristics are generally vague and unreliable.
As mentioned it involves our beliefs and assumptions about the world. We cannot separate ourselves from the equation and we cannot get outside our minds to know reality.
We use our minds to develop
effective theories by testing hypotheses based on observation. If you're looking for reality, you must hope that our observations echo, or correlate with, reality - a plausible generalization.
Science takes the naturalistic and materialist view of the world/reality without scientific justification which makes it a metaphysical belief and therefore a philosophy of life.
Nope, it just produces explanatory models for observations.
But its the experience of pain itself that we need to address. That is real and it seems to show if anything that our Minds are not reducible to the brain mechanisms as we can override them to create phantom pain.
You're begging the question again by assuming dualism. The phantom pain problem is the opposite of what you suggest.
The issue is that amputation of a limb doesn't remove its representation from the brain's body map. The absence of neural input from the missing limb can make that part of the body map hypersensitive and susceptible to spontaneous activity (the same principle as the hallucinations seen in sensory deprivation) that is (mis)interpreted at a higher level as indicating real sensory input. So the inability to 'override' (suppress) those spurious activations is the problem.
We can experience things without actually being in a physical/objective state and we can change and create physical states with our mind. That our conscious/mind states exist prior to physical states and are the filter or gateway for everything that happens. Therefore are fundamental.
Evidence? If 'mind' is a label for a collection of physical processes in the brain (as I suggest it is) then experience is a name for how those processes change over time and our minds 'create physical states' because they are physical processes.
If you have evidence that conscious states exist 'prior' to physical states, I like to see it. There is a mountain of evidence that we don't become consciously aware of sensory input until it exceeds a certain strength threshold, prior to which our brains are often
unconsciously aware of that input, and that may modify our behaviour. IOW, the evidence indicates that consciousness is the
last to know what's going on; i.e. it is informed on a 'need-to-know' basis.
We don't see the world as objects first. We see the mental concept we place on them according to our experience of them. So we don't see the block of metal moving around the streets. We see a bus, what that represents to mental meaning. We map the world this way.
Again, you have this backwards. There are two visual pathways, one is an evolutionarily ancient pathway to the mid-brain, common to all vertebrates, that deals with objects by size, movement, and self-relative position (known as the 'blindsight' pathway). The other is a more recent pathway to the visual cortex, that deals with more sophisticated processing - object recognition, environment mapping & location, etc.
The first is unconscious, and the second involves consciousness via a hierarchy of processing from simple to increasingly sophisticated, together with predictive feedback from higher levels. So the perception of a bus develops progressively, as the predictions of our expectation model are corrected by our sensory input processing to rapidly and efficiently produce a coherent & consistent internal model.
We are consciously aware of this internal model fairly late in the process, but we do occasionally experience a belated adjustment or reinterpretation - as when a wounded bird flapping in the road turns out to be a plastic bag blowing in the wind...
Material naturalism is an attempt to quantify the world where as our conscious experience of the world is direct to as as it happens without introducing material mechanisms which are beyond Mind therefore more fundamental.
Nope.
We already have this evidence with quantum physics. We know at the fundamental level that the world we see is not actually how things work in the classical sense.
We only know that the quantum model is a more complete description - just as the Einsteinian model is a more complete description than the Newtonian model.
Any understanding about fundamental reality need to include the subject. Interpretations that include the observer participating in understanding reality seem to offer the best explanations.
All interpretations must involve the observer participating in understanding reality. You just seem not to like the ones that treat the observer as just another physical entity (quantum system) - yet that's a major lesson from quantum physics - treating the observer as classical and/or consciousness as having a special role (in wavefunction collapse) is not a successful approach.
The aspect from the subjects conscious experience of the objective world. The bus represents the material world, an object moving in time and space. But the subjects experience of these objects reveals a deeper level to the world where objects become concepts which have meaning and value as far as how the world works from a qualitative value.
We have a high-level internal model of the world whose objects/entities are 'nodules' of associative mappings of various strengths - these associations are what give concepts meaning, whether semantic or emotional.
This is as important if no more in understanding reality as the subjects Mind can actually change the physical world as well in that its not just about the objective outer world but the subjective inner world. Science can only tell us about the outer world. We still have to include the inner world if we want a complete understanding.
Science can tell us about the inner world by testing hypotheses; it's not easy, but we've made considerable progress since Freud.
The same can be said for the materialist view.
As far as science is concerned, observables are what count, and we look for explanations starting with what we already know. You can't explain the unexplained with the inexplicable.
But I think as far as subjective experience itself and not the material natural mechanisms a immaterial or supernatural explanation seems to fit as the Mind concepts for the metal objects cannot be reduced to brain mechanisms.
You keep asserting that without any supporting argument or evidence.
... if methodological naturalism isolates the supernatural from the natural then how can it claim that reality is fundamentally matter and there are no immaterial or supernatural influences.
Science is methodologically naturalist because no-one has devised an alternative that works as well. What is your suggestion?
How do you propose to test the hypothesis that there are immaterial or supernatural influences, i.e. how can you show they're
real?
