why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Alan V]

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?

Really? You don't think that scientists have now proven, beyond a doubt, that brains generate consciousness? You asked for specific scientific observations. What about studies of how drugs affect consciousness, how brain injuries affect consciousness, how conscious states are correlated with brain states, and so on? When you write dismissive statements like the above, it looks like you have read nothing at all about the subject. I would recommend the works of Dr. J. Allan Hobson to you, if that is the case. I have read most of them, and many of them several times with highlighting. (However, Sleep and Dreaming: Scientific Advances and Reconsideration published by Cambridge University Press was too technical for me.)

On the other hand, you have offered nothing to prove machines could be conscious. You just speculate, so I guess you are only interested in philosophy.

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.

Again, dismissiveness. Consciousness studies are very complex, and no doubt different aspects of consciousness evolved to solve different problems. For instance, self-consciousness seems likely to be an adaptation for social interations.

But the specific question was about qualia. Why did qualia evolve? I offered a perfectly reasonable explanation: because only internal states could guide a complex creature toward survival. A given creature would have to experience pleasures and pains, and prefer life over death, and so on. You can build an awful lot on those basic components.

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?

And I already answered: because biological creatures evolve in hostile or indifferent environments, they have to be self-motivated at a certain level of complexity. Please notice my qualifier at the end. I believe I used it twice or three times before already. Little machines like viruses can indeed survive without consciousness.

When a biological creature becomes conscious, it is no longer a machine by my definition of the word.

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.

There is nothing about what I said which deserves your dismissive responses. I would recommend you actually read a book on the topic of consciousness.

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I agree with you that it is perfectly reasonable to assume that other people have interior worlds, just as I do. It would be silly, impractical, and perhaps sociopathic to deny that. 

The point of asking the question, though, is to emphasize that science absolutely cannot prove that such a thing is true. This is another way of defining the "hard problem" of consciousness. 

Since nobody knows how the electrochemical events of the brain present themselves to the subject as experiences, there is no way for science to prove that in any given case (that is not me) that's what's happening. We can prove that when every normal brain is exposed to a police siren it reacts with activation in the same area. We can prove that the heart rate goes up and the skin gets clammy. We cannot prove that this is the result of personal experience as opposed to automatic programming. 

Again, nobody really believes that it is automatic programming. The point is that science can't prove it, because it can't show how interior experiences arise.

It depends on which science. Physics, no. We will never have any explanation for consciousness on that level, because consciousness is not reducible. It depends on very complex arrangements of matter.

However, the soft sciences like psychology and sociology can study consciousness effectively. Neurophysiology can indeed answer many interesting questions.

This is a paraphrase of something dream researcher Dr. J. Allan Hobson said to me: "Minds are the subjective experiences of having objective brains." I think that says a lot, though perhaps someone like Bennyboy would dismiss it out of hand as another deepity. Dr. Hobson did research at the Harvard Medical School, was very influential in his field, and authored Scientific American books on Consciousness and Sleep among many others.

You can actually ask people to report their subjective experiences. This wouldn't count as data in physics, but it does in the soft sciences, when carefully collected and compared between statistically significant numbers.

So you seem to have the same problem as Bennyboy, since you seem unaware of what consciousness studies have actually studied.