Do you mean evolution as in a survival advantage.
Yes, and the reasons why it could be a survival advantage.
That seems to be the scientific materialist position. For example 'inner reality' or 'conscious experience' which basically gives us the awareness of self and meaning to life is said to be an illusion. As many materialist scientists have claimed, there is no purpose or meaning to life even to the extent that our genes have tricked us into thinking we are conscious. This assumes a materialist reality under the guise of naturalism along with a restrictive measuring method that only counts what is assumed to be included or not.
You are mistaken. This is not a scientific question but a philosophical one. Some philosophers (e.g. Dan Dennett) use the term 'illusion' in reference to consciousness. In Dennett's case, he's referring to it as the brain's "
user illusion" of itself, by analogy with a computer's user interface of buttons made of pixels that are not real buttons and tell you nothing about how they really function.
Most philosophers use the term in a similar way; IOW, consciousness and the sense of self are illusions in that they are not what they seem to the experiencing individual in the same way that the phenomenal world - the experiential world of sensations, of sights, sounds, smells, etc. - is an illusion that usefully models the causes of the neural spike trains that enter the brain. The
experience is real, but in another sense, it's a construct, an illusion.
So long as science acknowledges its limitations and sticks to what it does best then there's no issue. But what tends to happen understandable as science and tech have proven so well is that dogma is formed and people begin to 'believe' that science also tells us what reality is and is not. Unfortunately this is inherent in the science method IMO.
This is another philosophical question. Science generates predictive models for our observations; if you wish, you can describe our observations as reflections of reality, and our models as representations of reality. You might say that the purpose or aspiration of science is to discover and describe reality, but it's really just a conceptual convenience; if you get hit by a bus, it's reasonable to think that the bus was real, but you might be mistaken about that - e.g. it might
really be a carnival float that looks like a bus. Was the bus an illusion? yes in one sense, no in another (see above).
As mentioned metaphysics is inherent in methodological naturalism so we cannot really separate philosophy from science. Just like we can't separate ourselves from any measure of the world.
I don't see why you think that - metaphysics is related to the
philosophy of science.
Can you give an argument to support it, with an example of how a scientist might need metaphysics in their everyday work?
Of course triggering part of the brain stem is going to extinguish consciousness just like a knock out punch will. This assumes that consciousness beyond the brain doesn't also have a physical influence.
It sounds like you're saying that consciousness is something physical '
beyond the brain'. Can you explain what you mean by that?
The brain may be a filter or receiver similar to a radio. The wires and transistors don't create radio waves. They are already out there in the cosmos. Its just a receiver of those waves.
If the brain was a receiver for consciousness like a TV is a receiver for broadcast TV programmes, then we wouldn't expect that messing with the brain would change the contents of the consciousness. It would be like messing with the insides of a TV and finding the studio decor of the TV programme newsroom changed, or the plot & actors of the movie, or the sex of the presenter...
I don't think we can even comprehend what it would look like. I know it wouldn't look like any physical or mechanistic process or not just that because the nature we are trying to explain is abstract, not of a substance or reducible to parts and mechanisms.
You're confusing the physical process and the emergent ('abstract') results, e.g. the patterns it produces. Consider musical instruments that use simple physical processes to produce complex patterns of sound in the air - an orchestra is just a collection of groups of various instruments performing their simple physical processes and producing emergent complex and interacting multi-layered patterns of sound; on one level, the melodies don't really interact with one another, they're written to sound that way (e.g. call & response), but on another level, the patterns of sound
do interact by, for example, reinforcing each other at specified times to produce higher level patterns. I think that's a nice analogy for what happens in the brain.
You're also begging the question by assuming, "
the nature we are trying to explain is ... not of a substance or reducible to parts and mechanisms." This is the same error that stymied biologists looking for the '
vital force' of life (and some people still can't let it go). It turned out, on close examination, that the 'life force' that seemed so obviously present and necessary, was just an 'illusion', an emergent artefact of the complex chemistry of cells. A number of scientists & philosophers (e.g. Anil Seth) think that there's a good chance that, on close examination, consciousness will turn out to be similarly evanescent.
I guess that's the hard problem of consciousness.
No, it isn't. The 'hard problem' of consciousness is
why we have subjective experience, i.e. why there is
something it is like to be a conscious entity.
I have links at some of the attempts to explain this non-material nature in us and the universe. But I think its a new frontier and still developing. But there is some good evidence as far as I can see. We just have to be open to it which means letting go of the assumption that everything is material and naturalistic.
Once more I'll ask you,
what evidence do you see?
It seems to me you'll have difficulty explaining what has been asserted without evidence.
But for many this is begging the question. Your assuming that the materialist view of fundamental reality is correct.
Nope; a library of empirical evidence tells us that pain or exhilaration are correlated with the collective activity of billions of nerve cells. No one claims that correlation is causation, but in the absence of any other coherent and/or testable hypothesis, that's where the focus of attention is.
Even so this doesn't make sense or make a good argument because I don't think it matters as to whether its 1 nerve cell or neuron or a combination of many it still cannot explain how these experiences, self awareness of the very neurons and cells in ones own existence can be created, programmed or emerge from inanimate matter.
Unsubstantiated assertion; the argument from incredulity is a fallacy. Hypotheses are not falsified because of your incredulity.
It would be like the ghost in the machine. Somehow the conglomeration of nuts, bolts, wiring has created self awareness. If that's so then we should be able to build a robot complex enough mimicking the brain which would then become conscious of itself. In fact not only conscious of itself but conscious that another conscious being replicated itself.
Setting aside your straw man '
conglomeration of nuts, bolts, wiring', what problem do you see with the idea that, in principle, we could produce a conscious machine?
I suspect you're begging the question again by the prior assumption that consciousness is not the product of material processes.
And I think that's the problem. The science method cannot explain consciousness because it cannot get outside the thing its making correlations with to understand the fundamental nature and see if those correlations stand up.
It's a problem, but if it's the same kind of problem as the 'vital force', a sufficiently detailed level of correlations will be explanatory. As I said before, all we ever have to explain our observations and experiences are correlations.
