Actually its not assuming as it is well accepted that conscious experience cannot be reducible to material mechanisms because its an entirely different type of phenomena being qualitative rather than quantitative. Hence the 'Hard problem of consciousness.
I'm not sure what you mean by, "
conscious experience cannot be reducible to material mechanisms", but the scientific consensus is that consciousness is the product of physical phenomena. I already explained why subjective experience has a qualitative aspect - sensory experiences must be differentiable as well as quantifiable. The 'Hard problem' simply states that we don't know how to achieve an objective explanation of subjective experience.
... conscious experience was deemed to be outside sciences ability to measure because its nature is not a quantitative measure.Any theory of consciousness that does not contain this qualitative nature is incomplete.
As I've said before, we have no objective measure of subjective experience, and there's no way to compare subjective experiences between individuals (it's oxymoronic), so what you want can't be part of a scientific theory; but we can construct a theory that can predict what changes in their experience someone will
report (the only guide we have beyond behavioural inference) given specific changes in their sensory input or brain function. But if we can never
know specifically what their experience is, we can never explain
why it is specifically what it is - the question isn't coherent.
I disagree that there is no evidence and that I'm being credulous. Interpretations of QM support the observer/subject/Mind as a fundamental part of reality.
So arguments that make the subjects consciousness and Mind as fundamental seems to be the best fit and most promising explanation for what we find with QM.
Interpretations of QM are not evidence. Arguments that make consciousness and/or 'mind' fundamental are not evidence and explain nothing. Deciding that something is fundamental puts it beyond explanation by making it Brute Fact.
Can you explain how deciding that consciousness and Mind are fundamental explains anything? I suggest it just raises more unanswerable questions.
I disagree. I think its all our problems to work out what is going on.
Straw man. I didn't say it's not our problem to work out what's going on, I said, "
... if you imagine something that is, by definition, beyond the purview of science & the physical world, that's not science's problem, it's your problem. The onus is on you to show why anyone should take it seriously and how it is a good explanation."
To then make claims that there is only 'matter' or 'matter' is the only concern or real measure we need is more about metaphysical claims then science. That is why I said earlier that reality is not just about 'matter' but also 'what Matters' to us.
We all know that scientific materialism cannot give a complete account of reality because we know from our 1st hand experience that there are phenomena that have an impact on us, civilizations and the world.
As before, science doesn't claim there is 'only matter', and first-hand experience is known to be unreliable (which is why we developed 'scientific methods').
You're now just repeating complaints that have already been addressed, without providing anything new.
Complaining that science can't or won't address what you say is beyond science is absurd. Again, if you have some alternative approach, then describe it.
The idea that the only thing that matters is 'matter' is the result of the success of science in modern life. But to make ontological claims that 'matter' is all there is becomes a belief and not a scientific fact.
I wouldn't argue with that, but who is really saying "
the only thing that matters is 'matter'"?
All we have is our conscious experience and 'matter' is a concept of the Mind and not an actual true representation of what's out there at work.
And for any complete theory of consciousness we need to include and explain how, why we have subjective experience. Why joy or the color yellow come out of material and mechanical processes.
Therefore as you mention as these qualitative aspects are inaccessible to the science method we either have to say science is at a dead end as it cannot overcome the explanatory gap or we find a different way to account for consciousness that includes the qualitative aspects.
Explanatory gaps don't imply dead ends. What do you suggest as a 'different way' to account for consciousness?
I disagree. We only ever have correlates and material answers when we assume everything is material and block out other ways of knowing reality. If we are open and neutral about what we find with conscious experience there may be other ways to see how it works in the world.
Other ways, such as?
We know for example that Indigenous knowledge is different to scientific materialism and has been around for 10's of 1,000s of years. So its really about epistemology, how we should know reality and that happens before we measure anything. I think we can gain knowledge about the world direct from our conscious experiences. They carry a strong representation of reality is certain cases.
Of course our conscious experiences strongly represent reality - they are
how we experience reality - our brains generate our subjective reality as a predictive model from the neural spike trains that enter our skulls. That's why all we ever have for evidence about the world are correlations (between what our reality model predicts and what the incoming neural spike trains tells us). That's why we can't compare our subjective experiences but we can compare our world models.
Love cannot be defined by specific feelings and behaviors as it works differently for people. We can be hero's but we can also be fools for love.
We do naturally reify love because its a powerful emotion that has impacted in the world. Especially its opposite 'hate' where we have gone to war and killed. The idea that abstract transcendent ideas have no status in the world as far as reality is concerned is a materialist view and an assumption that is not based on science.
Who says, '
abstract transcendent ideas have no status in the world'? - looks like another straw man.
The unexplained problem still remains. The problem is a physical process has created some unexplained magical phenomena. A non-conscious entity has created a conscious one. That's what needs to be explained rather than thinking that correlates alone will by the answer.
If consciousness is 'magical', it is, by definition, beyond explanation - but that's an unwarranted assumption.
A non-conscious physical entity becomes conscious when its brain changes the way it processes information - i.e. when it wakes up! If you can't let go of dualism you'll always be chasing ghosts.
Isn't that begging the question in assuming that the brain creates consciousness. There is no direct connection but rather assumptions of association, you have to jump an explanatory gap which undermines any conclusions.
It's not begging the question, it's a hypothesis (or, if you prefer, an inference) based on observation, and one that is supported by the available scientific evidence to date.
Very few hypotheses or theories about the world have no explanatory gaps; the point is whether they are good explanatory and predictive models notwithstanding the explanatory gaps. For example, Newtonian gravity - the idea that every mass attracted every other mass with a force proportional to the amount of mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance. No one knew how mass generated the attractive force (arguably, we still don't), but despite the huge explanatory gap, the idea had huge explanatory & predictive power.
Besides how does a group of birds or fish create something beyond a material explanation. What is it they create that is like consciousness and if they do isn't that just more magical thinking where now groups of animals are creating something beyond a material explanation.
No, it was an analogy. I said birds or fish together create something
emergent, i.e. mass behaviour that is not predictable from the behaviour of the individuals and follows different rules. Analogously, the neurons in the brain create something emergent that is not predictable from the behaviour of individual neurons and follows different rules. Consciousness is just a small part of it - possibly a higher level of emergence again.
And for a theory of consciousness we need to explain how a subjective experience can come from non subjective brain wiring. That's the explanatory gap as there is a different type of phenomena happening in subjective consciousness that non conscious matter can possible contain
That's difficult, for ethical reasons, but not, in principle, impossible. We already know the gross neural correlations of consciousness and some more specific details. If we can identify which neural circuits/activities are essential to conscious experience, we could (again, in principle) 'drill down' and identify, by selective interference, which parts play which roles in consciousness. However, I suspect that, in practice, this will be complicated by the intimate dependence & interaction between areas involved with consciousness and the unconscious areas. But, of course, we'd still only have the subject's
reported consciousness to go on.
IOW, we might, in principle, be able to say that when a self-modeling, self-monitoring system has certain information-processing circuitry arranged in
this particular way, with access to
these particular processing subsystems, and supplied with
that kind of input information, it will report a sense of conscious awareness - and because that's how our brains achieve consciousness, we would be justified in assuming that it does have subjective experience. It seems unlikely in practice.
Exactly and its subjective experience we want to explain and not the behavior associated with it.
Explanations are objective. All we have to go on is the associated behaviour. I'm not sure why you're having such difficulty grasping this.
I meant the Modern Synthesis But as far as I understand they are secondary influences that basically stem from processes that can be reduced to natural forces like natural selection where natural selection alone is the driving force of evolution. Whereas creatures have the ability to get in the drivers seat and steer things around thus having an ability to override natural forces.
But the creatures are part of nature; to each other, they are part of the environment. Competition between individuals is a selective pressure, the effects creatures have on the environment is a selective pressure; everything that influences reproductive success is a selection pressure. It doesn't really matter whether you decide that some selective pressures are 'natural' and some aren't, that's just semantics. Evolution doesn't care about semantics.
