why do we enjoy poetry From the perspective of neuroscience?

[Alan V]

I have already offered you information that explains why brains allow for consciousness when other systems do not.  You simply don't agree with it.

I must have missed this information. What was it again? 

If by "consciousness" bennyboy means qualia -- the experience given to us by the senses as perceived by a subject -- then he's right that this hasn't been explained yet. Gazzaniga, as you recall, said that this question hasn't been answered yet. I haven't followed all the posts, but earlier this is what bennyboy and I were talking about.

What gives you the impression that bennyboy is being disingenuous? In what way is science threatening something he likes? Since science has no competing theories for how qualia appear to us, he is not arguing against any science.

The three ideas he's suggesting -- idealism, panpsychism, and physical supervenience -- are current speculations offering tentative explanations to things science has not explained and, as of yet, has no testable theories about. They may or may not be true, but I don't see bennyboy declaring that they must be true.

I think he's being disingenuous because he keeps denying I am offering explanations and information when I am. He seems to think science has done nothing to address the questions he keeps repeating, when he doesn't grasp the answers provided. Science does offer a theory about qualia, so while his "alternatives" may be philosophical speculations, I don't see them as scientific at all. On what observations are they based? He offers nothing but criticisms of ideas he doesn't think answer what are just philosophical questions. He has no warrant for anything in science.

In simple form: We are our bodies. Sensory information happens to us. It literally impacts upon us: light, temperature, pressure. Brain science has shown how the brain abstracts and interprets such information and presents it to our bodies, to us, in our brains. If you doubt this, study the brain science. Therefore the real question is why we are selves to begin with, not why we have qualia. THAT is the question science hasn't answered yet (along with some of the details of the mechanics). THAT is the question about which the book I mentioned speculates: how did life differentiate from non-life and how did that lead to selves?

IMO there is no "hard problem of consciousness" dealing with qualia for people like me who think we are our bodies. It's a purely philosophical question.

Perhaps the real problem is that philosophers think scientists are accountable to them, and must explain things to them in their own terms. That is based on the assumption that science is just a branch of philosophy, when it's really a spinoff. Philosophers can speculate however they want, but they are not the final judges on the importance of scientific research.