why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[bennyboy]

"Electrochemical events in the brain are perceived by the subject as experiences because it's an emergent property and someday we'll know why that is" is about the same.

No, electrochemical events in the brain are perceived by the subject as experiences because they are happening to the subject's body, to him or her.  We won't understand it in the way you prefer because it doesn't reduce to simple explanations.  This is implied by emergentism: New properties of a complex arrangement of matter like the human brain cannot be explained by simply examining its components working in isolation.  In other words, they don't reduce to mere physics or even to component parts.  Thus the orchestra analogy.

You may think you're making me look foolish, but you're making yourself look foolish to me for not understanding what emergentism implies.

What neither you nor Bennyboy seem to understand is that I am trying to provide my own interpretations of what I have read from scientific experts.  In fact, I'm presently working on a summary of points from the book The Consciousness Instinct by Michael Gazzaniga to explain what I mean, since you obviously won't take it from me.  I will likely post that within the week.  If that doesn't help, I will stop trying to explain this subject to you.

The bottom line is that scientific experts do offer complex explanations for "Unraveling the Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind" -- the subtitle of the book.  You and Bennyboy simply don't agree with them.  Thus your overstated arguments against them.

So far, you've stated as fact ideas which beg the question-- they define consciousness in such a way that they can be operationalized for scientific discussion.

"Scientific experts" is a clear appeal to authority, but I don't recognize scientists as authorities in the philosophy of mind.  That's because I know that science is based on physical observations, and I do not believe that there are any physical observations which can establish that mind is even an existent thing, let alone study it directly.  What you must do is to make philosophical assumptions about things which ARE observable-- neural correlates, reports of experience, certain behaviors and so on.

It's easy for me, a human, to make the jump that other humans likely experience roughly as I do.  Knowing that humans have brains, and that their behaviors change in certain ways in response to drugs, brain damage, or select stimulus, I can be pretty comfortable that I'm doing science of mind.

But all this requires a few philosophical assumptions to be made which cannot be made scientifically at all:
1)  There actually IS a physical universe with brains and people in it.  We are not in the Matrix, the Mind of God, or otherwise deceived about the ultimate source of experience.
2)  Minds outside my own exist at all, in any form.
3)  Things that correlate for me personally-- like feelings, ideas and behaviors-- DO in fact correlate to real feelings and ideas in other physical systems, rather than just seeming to.

I'd argue that (1) quantum mechanics demonstrates conclusively that the Universe as we perceive it  does not, in fact exist.  It's something very different than whatever I think it is.  So this assumption isn't a safe one to make.

I'd argue that (2) is never provable, ever, by any observations I can make.  At best, other minds can seem to me  to exist, and I will accept seems-as-is for pragmatic reasons.  But this kind of philosophical assumption, while fine for my sense of purpose in life, begs the question if I attempt to use it as a foundation for the study of mind.

(3) Seems fine as long as I've already accepted (1) and (2), and as long as I'm talking about people or people-like animals (i.e. ones with nervous systems which exhibit motivated behavior).  But I don't think you can say you have a good scientific theory of mind if you cannot identify for sure whether any physical system X (say something found on an alien planet or an advanced AI robot in 2050) really experiences the universe subjectively rather than seeming to.

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So can we program robots to be intuitive and thus fallible and would that be worth doing if possible?

I'd say that any "intelligence" which simplifies data into symbols will always be fallible, because in a complex Universe, some accidental artifacts will reduce down to symbols.  A car's computer, for example, will have to determine what collection of input photons represents a traffic line-- but it may be that due to shadows, coloration on the road, glare from other vehicles, etc., that a false match sometimes comes up.