Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[GrandizerII]

I'm pretty sure you do. I'm not a solipsist, lol.

Why not? It is logically consistent.

I don't hold to solipsism as true because of a worldview I hold with its presuppositions and assumptions based on my learning (including my understanding of the current science), observation and intuition. However, sure, there is a very remote possibility that I could be the only one with a mind, but I just don't see it as plausible.

What does it mean for my experiences to be insufficent? If it's out there in my face, it's an experience I'm having. And that's all that takes to know I'm having an experience. Sure, I could be vividly seeing more stuff than I am right now, but I'm still vividly seeing stuff.

How do you know that you are actually 'experiencing' something?

Because I am experiencing something. The experience itself is what lends me that knowledge.

Even if you want to argue, as the illusionist does, that it only seems that I'm experiencing, that response itself still acknowledges that I'm experiencing something. Because what else would it mean to say "it seems like I'm experiencing"?

Even if consciousness is based on a certain circuit or program, it's clearly not the same as that circuit or program. They're qualitatively two different things. Consciousness is not an abstract label we're applying to circuitry.

No, but like other things, it might well be once we understand it. We don't understand consciousness well right now. It certainly seems logically possible that it is *really* a certain property of circuitry and we just have to figure that out. You know, like we had to figure out that air is a mixture of gases.

Air is the mixture of gases, and that's all air is. It's not something else other than the mixture but linked to the mixture, or it's not the mixture plus something else. It is exactly that (in this physical universe at least; I'm not concerned here about other metaphysically possible universes/worlds in which air is something else).

With consciousness, we have neurons firing which is all very physical and accessible from a third-person perspective, but we also have first-person perspective of stuff that vividly occurs to us in a way that is not susceptible to scientific observation. So it does feel like they have to be two distinct things qualitatively, and therefore without any good reason to suggest otherwise, the hard problem stands.

Note the hard problem doesn't make the statement that consciousness is not basically the neural activity, though (I mean, it may end up being that case after all), but what it says is that, given what we currently know and observe, it seems like there is quite a challenge from a physicalist/materialist POV to determine how third-person-observable physical processes give rise to first-person qualities that do not feel physical, with things-being-experienced looking colorful, emitting loud noises and pleasant smells, and inducing certain feels and pains, and so on ... in a way that's very vivid or, as you or someone else described them, as "shiny".

And that challenge goes beyond just "oh, we'll figure it out eventually, just a matter of time and resources"; it's to the point we just can't conceive of any plausible way this could happen without having to give up some aspect of physicalism/materialism.