Monist vs. Dualist Experiment?

[genkaus]

Genkaus, we have both already accepted the close relationship and correlation between brain states/processes and mental properties.

And the only thing stopping you from taking the next logical step is your insistence on leaving space for some sort of magical, non-physical phenomena.

You take that correlation as evidence for a causal link between low-level physical processes and qualia, apparently defined as a high-level emergent property. None of your replies justify this assumption.

No - what I take as evidence of causal link is that change in one results in expected change in the other.

You either dismiss counter-arguments with hand-waving or restate your assumption by wrapping it in behaviorism.

That's because that's all your 'counter-arguments' are worthy of. Like I said, invoking the FSM as a counter-argument to gravit does not deserve anything more than a hand-wave.

My objections (emergence as a linguistic convention, the implicit over-determination or epiphenomenalism of causal closure, evolution’s blindness to qualitative states, and the sign/significance relationship) stand unanswered.

No, those objections have been answered already. There is no emergence in my view of qualia, there is no over-determination or epiphenomenalism, there is an evolutionary advantage to developing subjective experience and the sign-significance relationship makes sense only within the context of subjective experience.

Few of the additional empirical features you mention (in addition to verbal reports of pain) would be present in a machine intelligence, like the hypothetical Cyberboy.

Prove it. I'd say that the Cyberboy displaying those features would mean that it has been installed with the qualia function.

Biological similarities allow you to reasonably conclude that other humans experience subjective states of awareness.

No, the knowledge that biological mechanisms perform specific functions allows me to reasonably conclude qualia in others.

You have no similar basis for extending that capacity to radically different physiologies, from huge Babbage computers to silicon-based life forms.

I would - that basis would be replication of those functions within these radically different physiologies.

If there is a specific physical property you have in mind that allows consciousness to be realized across multiple platforms, then you need to be clear about what you think that property could be.

I've been clear - that property would be self-referential data processing.