why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[The Grand Nudger]

Let me clarify.  It matters very little to me if I'm in the Matrix-- I am what I am, and that's my arena of exploration.

You -are- the matrix. 

What matters is whether some or all of apparently conscious agents are simulations.  With people, it's not that important since I've mainly decided just to pretend everyone's real in the same way I am, in an effort to keep myself from spending my life masturbating on buses and throwing poop at American presidents just because it's fun.  But a good science of mind really needs some way to go beyond the assumptions implicit in that-- I'd very much like to see a good theory of mind, and to see how it establishes criteria for sentience in non-Earth physical systems, organic or otherwise.

Is there a difference between "simulators" and real people.  That question needs to be answered before we demand that science be able to distinguish between the two.  As far as the latter, that's going to be a long way off.  Which theories of mind have you seen?  

And yes, my agnosticism about sense-source and therefore inferences drawn is very much part of whatever framework I'm in.  QM makes me pretty seriously paranoid.  It's not hard to go from "AFTER the photon has passed through a double-slit apparatus, if you check the detector, it turns out to have been a particle, and if you don't, it turns out to have been a wave" to "Holy fuck. . . the Universe is watching me watch it, and under the hood, everything I think is real is squirrely bullshit.  Who's fucking with me?"

LOL, the quantum woosters gotya back when it was all the rage.  

Maybe.  The complicating factor is that the more I learn about reality, the less real it seems.  I feel that anyone who is confidently on solid footing with a sense of reality may not actually be following up on the science, and be stuck on billiard balls and molecules.

That seems peculiar to you, and in no way a means to infer things about others.