My thoughts on the Hard problem of consciousness

[emjay]

...under that view, has no causal affect on the material, no causal link can ever be proved between neural and phenomenal representation. So I just conclude they are both different sides of the same coin, and treat them as the same thing... talking and thinking about neural and phenomenal representations truly interchangeably.

What I find interesting is the tendency to consider third-person 'objective' phenomena real while first-person qualia and intentionality are the illusory epiphenomena. That is a completely arbitrary position. It seems to me that one could just as easily say that qualia and intentionality are what is truly real with causal power and that our model of the objective world is the epiphenomena without causal power.

Yes, I'm starting to find that interesting too... as I'm currently reading about Berkeley's idealism. If some form of idealism were true, then for it to be satisfying to me personally it would have to have some explanation of why the 'out there' was stable and highly correlated with the 'in here'... even more so regarding neuroscience than with any other scientific discipline... as in correlation between what 'out there' predicts and explains about 'in here'... and in the case of idealism 'out there' obviously is still 'in here', as it also is with materialism, but I mean what's deemed to be external and objective from the subjective point of view from either a materialistic or idealistic perspective.

For Berkeley, his explanation of the stability of the world is that it's the mind of God... or in the mind of God... but that doesn't really satisfy about why neuroscience correlates so well with mental experience... why a neural network perfectly explains (imo) the dynamics of experience, and at a much rougher level, why surgical manipulations, drugs, brain damage etc have predictable and explainable effects on phenomenal experience... so in a world before neuroscience, Berkeley's arguments might be a bit more convincing, but with it, there is that extra aspect, I think, for idealists to explain... how and why the subjectively external affects the very experience of the subjective... otherwise I'd invite them to forego mind altering drugs and painkillers if they think there is no relation 

But yes, it is an interesting point... why, in the case of two sides of the same coin, one side should... almost arbitrarily... be given precedence (from a causal point of view) over the other. And likewise interesting if there is any way to understand the neuroscience correlation from the sort of perspective you envisage... one where phenomenal mind has the causal power and matter is the, I guess, 'epimaterial' bystander ... just as a philosophical exercise.