why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

What you aren't addressing are the important questions:
1)  If science is about observation, what observations do you make to establish whether a given system does/doesn't have a subjective experience of reality?

I already answered: a living body with an operational brain and nervous system.

And this is based on what? Your godlike understanding of the nature of consciousness? A hunch? What? Since you are such a huge champion of scientific technique. . . what particular scientific techniques have you applied in arriving at this deep understanding of the nature of subjective awareness?

2)  Why is there any such thing as subjective experience in a material monist reality, in which all process are mechanistic?

I already answered: because there is nothing external which can assure the survival of complex creatures, so they must be self-motivated -- which also requires subjective states as feedback.

I believe you're making stuff up, and you do not in fact know the nature of consciousness, or what is required for it to exist. You claim to be big on science, but you've supplied absolutely nothing but statement by fiat, which is the opposite of science.

But what you are missing is that evolution could not have created such an advanced machine, because there is nothing in hostile or indifferent environments to do so.  Only intelligent humans with their own motivations could, which is also why such a machine would never require consciousness.  Programming imposed from without supplants the functions of evolved awareness.

Eh. If you are a material monist, then evolution HAS in fact created such an advanced machine, except that this particular advanced machine IS capable of subjective awareness. What you haven't explained is why you think one advanced machine can experience qualia, while you insist that the other could not. How, exactly, do you claim to know such a distinction?

I would like to add that your further question indicates that you are looking for reductionistic answers about consciousness.  I think it is an emergent property, and is therefore not reducible to mechanistic physics.  It depends, instead, on a very complex arrangement of materials -- without which it couldn't exist.  This is why consciousness disappears with death.  It doesn't split up into all the pieces of consciousness.

So basically, you take the brain and say "See. . . this is what's required!" That's not a particularly compelling explanation. I suppose rain requires wetness, and the creation of the Cosmos requires matter and time? Deepity.