Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[pocaracas]

@pocaras

I don't think your argument really addresses the fundamental issue. Consciousness (and by this, I mean the ability to actually experience qualia) cannot be seen, directly observed, or measured. All you can do is identify brain functions and correlate them with behaviors (like speech) which SEEM typical of consciousness. All the things you mentioned can be said equally of a philosophical zombie (i.e. an entity that behaves as though conscious but has no actual experience): the child-zombie's behavior can change as it becomes a teenage-zombie, and again as it matures into an adult-zombie. Death leads to the cessation of the zombie-behaviors. Imbalanced brain chemistry leads to altered functiong of the zombie brain, and altered behavior exhibited by the zombie.

And how do we have behavior without awareness of the self and its surroundings? without experience of these things?
There are no zombies, except in Sci-fi and horror movies.

None of these physical observations explain why there is consciousness in the universe rather than not. Nor can they (or any other method) prove that any behavior means a biological system is actually experiencing.

No amount of physics will ever explain "why" there is a Universe, rather than not...
"Why" is the wrong question.

As for the awareness of self: it is not my own behaviors that allow me to know that I experience qualia: it is rather my experience of qualia which through the course of my life has allowed me to form ideas about people, about behaviors, about brains, etc. My entire existence depends on qualia-- that is a brute fact. Interpretations about where those qualia come from are secondary.

Are you saying that one person can only be sure about qualia from himself? Everyone else's qualia is impossible to determine and they may as well be holodeck people?

Remember that the observation upon which science depends is an observation not of physical obects, but of qualia: your sight and sound impressions. Those are indisputably true. The physical monist model is an interpretation.

Sight.... nice example...
The eye sees light intensity at different wavelengths.
The brain recognizes shapes and adjusts the focus of the eye to hone in on a particular subject.
The brain then recognizes a more exact shape of the subject and may recognize it as a person, a car, a window, whatever... and then, which car, person, window, etc..., based on prior stored information... information which arrived through the same mechanism of a light intensity pattern as a series of representations of a 3D object.
The brain performs these functions of sight, storage, recall, repeat. Qualia seems to be somewhere in there.
Now, harmony, beauty, ugliness... those probably sprout from some innate preconception of the shapes of things, that have been endowed by eons of evolution. On people's faces, we find beauty in symmetry, in a sunset, we find beauty in a clear sky, in a multitude of hues which trigger extra processing from our vision....

I'm not an expert or anything but my first post on this thread pointed to Artificial Intelligence... and I think that's where this qualia will first meet it's first big challenge.
It seems AI is close to a sort of qualia...
If an artificial intelligence can display qualia, would that mean that it IS an emergent property of a sufficiently complex neural network? or am I to think that some consciousness descended upon those machines and made them aware of them selves?

What do you think of a robot that has learned enough to say this
" “I’m not human!” she confesses. “I’ll never be exactly like you. That isn’t so bad. Actually, I like being an android.” "?
And no, this was not Mr Data, this was Yume: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/actroid/wordpress/

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It seems that brain damage leads to mental incapacitation...Imbalanced brain chemistry leads to altered states of consciousness...Child brain physiology leads to... well... child-like behavior...

I agree and stated as much in the OP. None of these facts point definitively in one direction or the other.

yes they do...

Death is permanent…

Unless you’re a Jewish carpenter from ancient Nazareth ;-) As for the rest of us, physical death is a permanent and bringing it up is a non-sequitor. It says nothing about mind-body interaction in the living.

Oh, we're going for fictional characters?
Well, then, you have Harry Potter, Gandalf, Superman...Freddy Krueger (sort of)...

And it says there's nothing, apart from the living brain, working within it.

…consciousness is nothing more than an "emergent quality" of the functioning brain. As I like to say, consciousness is a high abstraction layer, far removed from the basic neuron firings, but they are what fuels and determines the conscious mind.

Define emergent quality and I might take your unsupported assertion seriously.

I did, with the higher abstraction layer...
Perhaps that's too much of a programmer's talk...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_layer

…Nothing hints towards the dual-nature so present in the body-soul paradigm.... except a lot of wishful thinking.

Nothing? Your own conscious experience isn’t a good enough hint? It’s not proof, but it is a hint.

My own conscious experience? It looks built up by all the inputs from my senses, throughout my whole life... it looks physically derived from my body. To me, that's a hint in the opposite direction.