Seeing red

[emjay]

I don't know how you've got to this, thinking that I'm trying to 'bait and switch' you  

Not you personally, man, lol.  Our minds play implicational games with us.

Phew   Trust me, I know all about the tricks that the mind can play like that, I play Mafia

First of all you can cross off "a personal god" from the above because I would not even hazard that as a possible alternative.

You did posit it, that's what theism is. 

I think it was a bad choice of words on my part. By saying "No, I don't have any examples because I don't think there are any examples. If there were, then there'd be no point in even assuming that the brain had anything to do with consciousness, and then it would be into theist, dualism territory." I was meaning that I thought it would lead to the sorts of bad arguments put forward by theists of a soul that is either completely independent of the brain or only partially dependent on it, but which in either case receive the same response from me of 'if that's the case, why have a brain in the first place?'. And that particular response is all I need to stop me ever going in the soul direction again.

But the second one, yes, if I could not even rely on the assumption that system X produces conscious state X... that system X in exactly the same state could produce two different perceptional states, then I would, myself, have to start thinking about other alternatives and probably give up on even trying to understand the brain and would probably end up going in Bennyboy's direction, of idealism.

Why, how does it follow?  You will have determined that something other than brain is involved....but not that some other fundamental "stuff" exists or is necessary..or that the brain is not involved.  We already think that something other than just the brain is involved in mind, in consciousness.  Neither dualism nor theism are required in order to account for this..merely an environment.

Okay, I think I'm starting to see what you're getting at. It wasn't at the forefront of my mind until Julia's post that the system includes the environment, which is in turn unique for everyone. I was confining my vision of the system to the brain, in the reductionistic way that I do, and although the net result is the same in the sense that I am aware of the structural changes that result from interaction with the environment, I didn't picture it in that way; of each human brain and its consciousness being the sum total not just of brain and body state but also of a life born in a particular and unique time and place in the universe and traversing a unique path through the environment it finds itself in over a lifetime. It's quite beautiful to look at it like that. And thinking about it like that, yes there could be other influences in the physical world - as yet discovered or not - that affect the system and/or consciousness.

But anyway, I need to go to bed now so we'll have to resume this discussion another day. Night night