Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

If your experience of redness is, in fact, the state of some portion of your brain..then poking the portion does indeed poke red.  Now the rule has been made invalid in the specific because it fails to exclude this -sufficient- possibility.

Okay, I'll dream up a unicorn, and then you try and poke it with a big needle.  Then try and poke the brain portions in which the unicorn is represented.  I might smell smoke, or the unicorn might vanish, but I can tell you what won't happen, 100%-- the unicorn won't get poked with your needle.  That's because the experience is an experience, and the mechanism is a mechanism.  They aren't the same.

This doesn't follow at all if experiences are the behavior of the mechanism. You may have different viewpoints on the behavior of the mechanism, that doesn't make them separate. What exactly are you arguing here? That because the experience appears different from the mechanism that brings about the experience that the two are distinct? That's just philosophical posturing. Even you can understand the reason why mechanism and experience are being equated. If I take the digital signal going to a TV and change out those bits representing Walter Cronkite with those representing Brad Pitt, I've certainly changed the experience because the experience and the mechanism are indivisible. You can't change the bits at all without changing the experience. The behavior of the mechanism is the experience. If I disable those parts of the brain that are responsible for creating the experience of redness, how have I not 'poked' redness? What are you expecting to see differently if the behavior of the mechanism and the experience aren't united?

And no, you can't poke red.  That's because red is a color, not an object, and only objects can be poked.  You can poke maybe the brain part that generates the experience of red, but you can't poke red.

You are being overly literal here. Your experience is being asserted as the behavior of the brain. You have no point here other than an obvious bit of perspectivism.

I think you are conflating representation with reality.  There are little people on my TV screen, but that's just a representation.  I can't touch the little people cuz boink! my finger will just bounce off the screen.  The movie characters won't be like "Hey, dude!  Don't poke me!"  Yeah, I could corrupt the file, or melt the physical film, or whatever, and fuck up the movie-- but that doesn't mean I'm doing those things to say Angelina Jolie.

But you are manipulating the image of Angelina Jolie. If I say instead of 'poke' that you can manipulate the experience of red by manipulating the brain? Then you have no argument, as your entire argument depends on a slavish literalism. How does what you are saying in any sense indicate that consciousness is not a product of the brain?