Seeing red

[The Grand Nudger]

I apologize.  I'm a little frustrated, because I'm ready to drop the idealism for now, and to look at a physicalist explanation of mind.  However, I've seen a lot of discussions that identify functions and none that identify mechanisms.  Words like "information"-- how does the universe "know" when information is happening, such that a mind might be made to occur?

See, if I believe 100% that all of the human mind is in the human brain, what do I learn, really?  I still do not know what about the brain it is that is experienced as conscious mind, or how multiple experiences are coordinated in a sense of self.

I don't think that the universe -does- know when information is happening.  I'm not really sure what that has to do with a mind occurring.  In any case, in a mechanistic explanation, the operations performed by the various portions of the brain -are- the things we are experiencing. You are experiencing, for example, the effect of alcohol on your brain...specifically the effect of ethanol molecules on receptors, when you are drunk.

 In response to my idea of a kind of "screen" or virtual stage in which multiple percepts could be coordinated, you said the brain is that space.  The brain is where it all comes together in a single sense of subjective self.  You could pull systems offline one by one: vision, smell, sound, etc. or in parts: face recognition, parallel lines recognition, syntactic recognition, etc. but I think at the core there's the essential being-ness.  But so far, I haven't heard enough specific details about how this is supposed to work in the brain.

The "essential being-ness"......?  Maybe essential being-ness doesn't work? Perhaps it's just not there. No explanation at any level of interaction will -ever- overcome the objection that something underlies it. Pulling parts away from the brain is pulling away the space in which that experience arises. There's no "empty room" where sound used to be, there's simply no "where sound used to be".