I notice you didn't answer my question: is your view a form of human exceptionalism, that you don't want to attribute consciousness to any other creatures?
Not at all. It’s just that the example I chose was a human organism. Many other organisms would have their own specific biological contributions to assist their brain in being a complete conscious being.
Straw man. I haven't claimed any logical or scientific contradiction.
I wasn’t saying there that you made a contradiction, I was saying that there’s no logical or scientific contradiction in me and my qualia zombie being completely identical in all physical and behavioral aspects. BECAUSE the qualia part that could be different between us is a phenomenon that falls outside the scope of empirical science, so science is in no position to call foul on such a claim, nor is logic.
If my qualia zombie has no mind, and I do, then there is no scientific experiment that can be done to tell the difference. However it IS a contradiction when you keep insisting that A = non-A. I don’t know why you keep imagining some sort of explanatory power from brain matter to states of mental phenomena when no explanations exist.
My claim is that the available evidence
Full stop. “The available ‘Empirical’ evidence…” Ok continue.
…indicates that mind is what the brain does,
There are many things that are in sync yet not identical, and then things that are identical as opposed to being distinct things that are in sync. And science can answer this question for many things and answer it in detail. So just stating as a brute fact that the mind is identical to the brain isn’t science. To solve a question of whether two things are identical to each other vs being in sync with each other would be done by empirical testing that looks for some type of matter/energy distinction. Testing a system for matter/energy distinctions has no value at all here because nobody is arguing that the matter isn’t the matter, and the chemical reactions aren’t the chemical reactions. You are sneaking in a philosophical opinion and trying to claim that science backs it up.
and so identical brains will do identical things in identical circumstances,
Brains & minds are in sync so I totally agree.
It further seems unreasonable to suggest that two systems that are by definition identical and behave indistinguishably under all circumstances, should differ in any way, let alone ways that are supposedly fundamental to determining their behaviour (which is, of course, identical by definition).
One system is purely of physics that has none of the properties that mental properties have, and the other system is experiential phenomena that has none of the properties that matter & chemical reactions have. How is that even close to identical by definition? What thoughts & emotions are, and what clumps of matter with chemical reactions are differ tremendously, so this makes no sense. You’re just using the words “By definition” to assert a philosophical opinion.
As for the contrast between body and mental experiences, there's a simple analogy - consider an electronic calculator; it is extended in space, it has mass, it has color, it has texture. Calculations are not extended in space, they have no mass, they have no color or texture. They are specific processes, like mental experiences.
Every single thing about the calculator, and every single operation that it could perform, is a non-abstract instantiation OF some abstract concept. THAT calculator on the desk is not at all like the general abstract concept of “Calculations.” The calculator IS empirically detectable in every way because it’s an instantiation of abstractions that are realized. “Electrical Current” is just a concept until it becomes real by being realized by the calculator, and when it’s realized then science can detect it. “Calculations” naturally can’t be extended in space because it’s just an abstraction. This analogy is mixing up abstractions with real instantiations of an abstraction.
“Pain experiences” and “Sorrow” are also just abstract ideas that don’t exist until they are realized. The difference though is that when a pain experience is instantiated and made real science STILL can’t detect it (like it can detect everything about the calculator). Exhaustive empirical analysis of a guy wincing and screaming in pain doesn’t let an alien that doesn’t experience pain learn what an actual experience of pain is, and an actual experience of pain is most definitely real and not just some abstraction of the concept of pain.
Now we can conversely consider an example where science IS the right tool for the job, where two things don’t look identical but science can show us that they are. We have the Sir Arthur Eddington quote and comparison between his scientific table vs his everyday commonplace table. This table that he sits down at to work…one description is that it is of a solid structure, that it is colored, that it doesn’t move, etc. But another description claims that the table is mostly emptiness, that sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electrical charges rushing about with great speed, etc. Explaining how these two physical descriptions that could seem different are actually identical is coherently explained by science, it is what science does. Science could present to you with a long list of details with many explanations on how the commonplace table reduces to the scientific table, and how the scientific table causes emergent fields of solidity, etc.
Science however could not at all hand you a comparable list of explications that connects the dots and described how the mind reduces to the brain, or how the brain causes psychophysical emergence. All science can possibly say here is “And somewhere around this point we have this additional feature of mental phenomena going on too.” Zero explanatory scope, as opposed to the wealth of explanations that science can give comparing the scientific table with the commonplace table.
Evidence tells us that Earth’s history somehow consists of a jump that took place from purely physical ontological existence to an inclusion of experiential ontology. If anything it is “By Definition” incoherent to make a claim that the tool used solely for explaining physical phenomena is somehow capable of giving an explanation of how physical ontology morphed into a combination of physical ontology & experiential ontology….and in addition explain how this relationship currently works. By definition science is a tool that’s insufficient to provide such explanations. And it never does offer explanations, it just states the addition of consciousness as a brute fact.
