why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[The Grand Nudger]

The same way it uses observations to establish any other thing.

It's a trite and unsatisfactory answer...but it's thoroughly true.  If you take issue, you take issue with the entire enterprise of science...-or-...you take special exception to neuroscience for reasons you don't take exception to in any other science.  Your call.

There's a difference. 

There isn't.   You may take a different sort of exception...but what nueroscience is doing is qualitatively no different than any other branch.  Their observations and inferences are just as strong (or weak) as any other, and for the same reasons...in every case.

Consider a world in which the above was not true..and, despite brilliant minds working on it, you, Benny, you..on AF.org....are the person who cracked it, and reduced neuroscience to non-science.  

If I'm studying the building of bridges, it's because I want the experience of walking on a bridge and it not falling down.  If I'm studying gravity, it's because I want to know why things move toward each other without the application of any other conspicuous actor.

.......funny you should mention gravity........we know less about that, fundamentally, than the human brain or consciousness.  Weird, right?  Bottom of the ocean is another one.

If I'm studying the effects of drugs on the brain, and subsequent experience, then that's fine-- I can ask people to report experiences, do brain scans and so on.  I'm perfectly good with that, and have benefited from that kind of science more than once.

-there's only one kind of science.  

But if I want to learn about psychogony, and in particular to know what physical systems do / don't experience subjectively, then I'm in a pickle.  You can ask people how they feel when you poke their brain with a pin, and be fairly comfortable with the underlying assumptions about physical reality and the ubiquity of real awareness in other people; but that's not really a scientific inference, it's a pragmatic axiom.  I can't ask a complex organic system on the Planet Zolotn, or the google 2100 Real-bot ™, at least not sensibly.

You're in no more or less of a pickle than you would be in the example above.  This isn't to say that you''re not in a pickle..but if you decide that route, I just want you to understand that this "pickle" is bigger than just the things about brains and minds you take exception to.  Not arguing with you, not trying to talk you out of anything, just trying to supply you with a broader perspective of the consequences of whichever route you take.

The objections you've mounted cannot be addressed in a vacuum. Those statements, inferences, claims, and conclusions whioch would be warranted in any other subject either apply to the brain and experience or they do not. If they do not..we have a special case. There's only two ways that can end. Either the brain really is different, fundamentally, than everything else, or we've engaged in special pleading. I'll let you decide, like the example of Benny from AF cracking nueroscience, above, which is more likely..between those two possible and exhaustive outcomes.

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In reality, meanwhile............ the who, what, when, where, and why of experience have been answered..it's the -how- we're working on, now. That's why these threads never fail to irritate me, lol. Theres a lag between the edge and the popular appraisal, and that leads people to communicate the issues of last generation and yesteryear as though they were weights pressing down on the minds of researchers today. You've been grappling with the cartesian drama..for example, in every thread about the mind that you've posted on these boards for as long as I've been here watching you post. I don't want you to take this as a personal dig, I spent the better part of a decade trying to solve a problem a 19 year old unpaid research intern rattled off to me as though it were rote kindergarten learning...recently. I'd spent time and money, lots of both, trying to solve an issue that some pimple faced baby knew the solution to by heart, lol.

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