Mindfulness or Mindlessness?

[vulcanlogician]

I know I harp on this in every conversation like this - but fully mapping and explaining a single human consciousness could not be expected to derive necessary insight into the next human consciousness and certainly would not apply to consciousness in toto if there's even one other non human consciousness anywhere in the universe.  

All we could ever say was that for this particular human...so and so..and humans broadly, so and so....though not uniformly - as none of us are completely identical in every relevant respect.  

Wouldn't it be horrible (for explanations) if every consciousness was as individually organized as that consciousness was individually instantiated in a meaningfully distinct conscious being?  We could never do better for an explanation than a cognitive form of pidgin, no matter how much data we collected..and if resolving this was the bar for resolving the purported mystery of consciousness...we could know everything about every instantiated consciousness and even come up with a universal translation between every known example and still not satisfy that explanatory demand.

Nudger, this is metaphysics. Satisfying explanatory demands ruins all the fun.

When all the possible explanatory demands are satisfied, the metaphysician presses onward. And that may be the point we've come to here. There's really no sure-fire way to know that we have. If it is the case that that's the point we've come to, no further explanation is possible... so, no point in pursuing further explanation. One of my professors shared a story about when he was in grad school: one of his fellow students would carry around a card with an "M" printed on it. The "M" stood for metaphysics. And whenever the conversation drifted from, say, ethics to metaphysics, he'd pull the "M" card out of his pocket and raise it up... to signify that the debate was drifting into metaphysics... and thus wasn't worth carrying further because the issue would never be resolved.

Another one of my professors expressed disdain for this anecdote. She said, "Well, I'm just going to pull out my 'E' card-- for epistemology-- because you're assuming knowledge you don't have." And she had a point. Since Descartes's time, we haven't "resolved" the mind problem. But we've clarified it. We've increased its resolution. Spinoza vastly improved upon Descartes's theories. And he was a contemporary. So, there is value in trying to clarify these issues, even if there's no way of knowing that they can't be further resolved.