consciousness?

[genkaus]

I do not disagree with this statement. Neuroscience deals with material properties and physical causes that are quantitative. Psychology deals with mental qualitative ones. Where I think we differ is that you want to reduce one set of properties to the other, in such a way that describing one is just another way of describing the other. They may be two sides of the same coin, but they have distinctly different properties. I question the assumption that a model of reality with only four forces and a handful of constants can meaningfully account for the appearance of mental properties.

As you said, an ideal theory would meet somewhere in the middle. I believe that middle ground includes something equally fundamental to the structure of the universe to account for qualia and all the mental properties built from them. That something need not be supernatural in the traditional sense, it would just extend our understanding to include all the basic features of the natural world.

Two mistakes here.

First, when I say the ideal theory would meet in the middle, I do not mean that it would have some aspects of both but be essentially separate from either. I mean that it would include both of them, i.e. both neuroscience and psychology would be two different applications of it. It wouldn't reduce one set of properties to the other, but each set of properties would be describable by using the the other set.

Second, and more importantly, is your assumption that 'qualia' is to be found somewhere in the fundamental structure of the universe. Consciousness is a holistic process - it requires a specific configuration of matter acting in a specific way with parts of it performing specific functions to exist. Even its simplest component - that of sensation - requires a complex structure where if a part is missing, it would not occur. You are going for the reductionist approach. You are trying to take a microscope to the parts and when you don't find consciousness below a certain level, you assume that there is fundamental and yet undetectable that is the cause, when all the evidence we have suggests otherwise. It is not that the cause consciousness itself is some fundamental force of universe that manifests itself only when a certain level of biological complexity is reached - it is that that complexity itself is the cause.

Not from my perspective. A ball could be composed of any number of different substances. A collection of atoms can assume multiple shapes. Even if they happen to co-exist in a single entity they are still very different in a way that makes a difference.

But that specific ball consists of those specific collection of atoms in that form and those specific collection of atoms make up the ball. That collection of atoms in that shape is the ball - even if these are two different ways of looking at it.