The Pixie wrote:
You tell me, you are the one claiming it is definitely not physical (in the more general sense). How do you think that has been confirmed?
Through the various arguments put forward, like David Chalmers' three arguments: the explanatory, the conceivability, and the knowledge argument. Maybe the easiest of these to understand is the last one which we've already touched on, with the neuroscientist Mary and whether it's plausible that she learns something new. There's Saul Kripke's argument, realted to Chalmers' conceivability argument, that the mental and the physical cannot be identical in the way that water is identical to H2O. Beyond these. there's the more general point that any attempt at reducing mental events to physical events leaves out what's essential to mental events, namely their subjective quality. Any try at an identity statement that leaves out what's essential to one of the things in question clearly fails, as if there were a putative identity statement: "water = ABC" where ABC leaves out all of the essential properties of water-- the statement would clearly fail. Subjectivity seems to be an irreducible feature of reality. Some things can only be understood from the inside. Reality is not just objective reality. Objectivity is a heuristic method for isolating certain features of reality that can be understood in a certain way, but that it's mistaken to assume that it applies to all of reality and that this assumption runs into insuperable problems.
And yet when I asked how that had been confirmed, you ducked the question!
Not sure what you're talking about. I've been telling you how it's been confirmed. I'm just not that motivated since you're so resistant to any new ideas -- it's probably all just a waste of effort. Your response to the "God and Smallpox" thread really's changed my opinion of spending a lot of energy doing this.
A philosophical argument supported by empirical evidence... So science then?
No, not science. Do you even read what I write? The inadequacy of our present concepts, including scientific concepts, is what's blocking our view of a solution. Science is premised on the idea that all of reality is objective, third person reality understood mathematically and spatiotemporally. Those ideas cannot be assumed in order to solve consciousness because those are the very ideas that have created the conceptual impasse in the first place.
In what way does that answer my question? Again, you seem to be ducking.
It will be solved in part with new minds thinking in new ways, thus the one funeral at a time.
It would not solve, it would model.
Who's ducking now? I was asking how you thought consciousness could be solved. You deflected onto something else.
So you have no idea either. You just have this seemingly unfounded hope that there is some conceptual revolution.
I never claimed to know in detail what that revolution will be like; if I did, it wouldn't be all that revolutionary, now, would it? My only point is now and has always been that consciousness is not physically reducible. I've only ever maintained that the solution does NOT lie in the direction of physical sciences. If there's some intractable problem, it's a good bet that there's something that human minds are missing, even if some human minds can say with confidence what the nature of the intractability is.