Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[I_am_not_mafia]

Show me the science that claims to account for qualia.

Explicitly define what you mean by qualia.

 Show me a plausible scientific theory of consciousness.

That's something different. I have a plausible scientific theory of consciousness. But first step I would have to do is to tell you what I think consciousness is. I also have a plausible scientific theory of intelligence. And of emotions. And in both cases I define what I mean by intelligence and emotions. There is also a plausible scientific theory and definition life which I hold to.

I can then go about trying to demonstrate that the idea is logically consistent by creating computer models. Other scientists may disagree with my definitions, but that's OK because they will say why it does not cover certain cases or propose a better definition.

For example, I described my own theory of consciousness here in this very forum and described it in terms of neural networks. You may disagree with my definition of consciousness, but that's OK if you give a valid reason for why it is lacking and then propose a better one that is more useful.

https://atheistforums.org/thread-45249-p...pid1394479

I recommend we send out some e-mails to educational institutions and ask THEM my questions.  I 100% guarantee you that they'll tell you they operate in the context of the assumptions I'm talking about, and that they are fine with that.  But I do not think they will be as mocking as you and Mathilda about philosophical questions; in fact, I suspect they probably take them very seriously.

I am a trained and published scientist that has worked in academia but if I received such a letter of course I wouldn't be mocking. It wouldn't be professional of me. But this is a discussion forum and so I can express what I truly feel about such concepts. Academics also express themselves more freely at conferences.

I've been to conferences where they have discussed consciousness and qualia. Even when someone has gone up and talked about qualia, they always try to define what they mean.

You simply cannot make any progress at all without doing so. This is why qualia is such a useless term. It's a quagmire.

I've actually done some study in neurology and psychology, written ANNs, and so on.  You think I'm just talking out of my ass, but it's partly my experience WITH the science of mind that leads me to take the philosophical issues so seriously.

By ANNs I assume you mean the classic kind with back propagation, activation functions and learning rules? That is an extremely simplistic model that is not biologically plausible. I suggest that you read Christoph Koch's Biophysics of Computation to show quite how complicated a single neuron actually is. It's computational complexity far surpasses a whole artificial neural network. Then try putting the biologically plausible neurons, with dendritic trees, neuromodulators, leakage and a local learning rule in a network that self organises. That will give you an entirely different view point on how the brain functions. Doing so really brought it home to me how the brain is a naturally occurring physical system.