consciousness?

[Angrboda]

The physicalist position is that "felt experiences" are physical events, and thus the mutual interaction is an accepted part of the explanation, leaving nothing extra to be accounted for.

Mutual interaction between what? Your statement tacitly acknowledges that two different things are involved while at the same time asserting that they are the same thing.

Um, the two different things involved are different physical things undergoing different physical events. I honestly don't have a clue about what the last part of your statement means. I'll try to be patient in the face of what appears either intentional dishonesty or rank stupidity. Felt experiences are physical events in the brain just like other aspects of mind are physical events in the brain; there's no shortage of "things" to interact with each other. Other than that, the only sense I can make of it is that you are either asserting that the brain is one unified, atomistic thing, possessed of no parts, or you are asserting that consciousness is a unified, atomistic thing, for which we have no actual objective evidence that such is the case, but more on that below.

The There is essentially zero evidence for the proposition that first-person qualitative experiences are a part of reality in the necessary sense.

Other than the direct, unmediated, and visceral feeling of being alive. I cannot imagine more compelling evidence.Now if you are saying that first-person experiences aren’t a necessary part of material reality, then I agree with you. In physical theories, feelings are not needed to explain behavior or the verbal reports of the subjects. You have to at least try to account for all the phenomena. That approach just pretends the phenomena doesn’t exist.

Phenomena have properties. And unless you have some rough idea of what those properties actually are, you're going to have considerable difficulty actually locating and demonstrating the thing. If "direct, unmediated, and visceral feeling" were evidence of what consciousness is, then we wouldn't be having this conversation, as the answer to the question of what consciousness is would have long ago been settled by introspection. Since it's clear that the "what" of consciousness is not readily known through introspection, the "that" of consciousness is unknown. I'm not denying the phenomenon, I'm simply denying that you have any evidence of the phenomena which is, to use the language of tv crime dramas, "not contaminated by the chain of evidence." I'm not suggesting there is no such thing as consciousness, I'm pointing out that the mind is an eminently impeachable witness as to its own nature, and lacking any other witnesses to its nature, you have no credible testimony to present.

(Unless, perhaps you're arguing that when I'm drunk, the other women in the bar all get super pretty, and that that's an actual objective fact that I can make inferences on the basis of. People on DMT declare themselves to have experienced the complete cessation of time and the evaporation of their distinctness from the universe as a whole. All that is proof of is that the mind of the person on DMT believes these things actually happened, not evidence that they actually happened. Or are we going to now have to admit the actual existence of all gods past and present based on what somebody's subjectivity believed? Belief is only evidence of belief; it isn't evidence of the things believed in. If the only "evidence" you have is what one person's mind believes about itself, that's no evidence that the contents of that belief are true. [As a consequence of evolution and shared brain phylogeny, many, many, people share the same or similar beliefs about the nature of their minds; these are, so-to-speak, the "default settings" of the machine. As in anything else, that a lot of people believe something is not in itself evidence of their belief's truth.] I'm not in any sense "denying the phenomena"; I'm denying the validity and reliability of your evidence for its nature and its existence in accordance with that description of its nature. (I normally consider a whole chain of what, why, and how as a pre-condition to knowing that, but given the subject, I think we should first focus on whether you have any independently verifiable knowledge of the "what" of consciousness. When you have that, and only then, will I likely consider any claims to knowing "that" to be even remotely well founded.)

The only evidence we have for the facts of subjective experience are the claims of that subjectivity as to the veracity, nature, and content of its experience. Nowhere else in science is the existence of a "real" phenomenon so unilaterally accepted in the almost total absence of any actual empirical evidence.

What is empirical mean if not something known from experience? Putting “real” in quotes shows that the maker of the statement excludes any non-material thing from the definition of real. It’s just another way to beg the question.

Empirical evidence (also empirical data, sense experience, empirical knowledge, or the a posteriori) is a source of knowledge acquired by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical evidence is information that justifies a belief in the truth or falsity of an empirical claim. In the empiricist view, one can only claim to have knowledge when one has a true belief based on empirical evidence. This stands in contrast to the rationalist view under which reason or reflection alone is considered to be evidence for the truth or falsity of some propositions. The senses are the primary source of empirical evidence. Although other sources of evidence, such as memory, and the testimony of others ultimately trace back to some sensory experience, they are considered to be secondary, or indirect.

Are you acquainted with someone who has sensory experience of the nature of consciousness? If so, I'd dearly love to speak with such a person. Whether they've simply seen consciousness or only heard a consciousness [can consciousness make sounds? Can it reflect or give off light?] doesn't particularly matter. Have you seen your own consciousness? It's not begging the question to demand that you produce the animal in question so that it may be inspected. Claiming it exists, and more specifically, that it exists as something with specific properties in the absence of being able to actually demonstrate that something actually has these properties, and then, expecting us to conclude it exists on the basis of that claim alone, well, I can't imagine a more petitio principii.

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And I've exhausted myself in accomplishing what I have thus far accomplished. I apologize if there are any gaps or missing links in my response, but this girl is veggie.