If beauty doesn't require God, why should morality? (Bite me Dr. Craig.)

[bennyboy]

Our descriptions are not complete. So I am not surprised that we cannot exhaustively account for all aspects of consciousness.

We cannot account for its most important aspect-- the fact of its existence. In order to account for it, a theory of consciousness has to be INTEGRATED with a theory of physical mechanism-- but then, it's no longer simply a mechanical explanation.

But the fact that our descriptions are not adequate does not mean we need to look elsewhere than the physiology and the chemistry and physics which underlies it. Can you suggest a more promising place to look for clues to understanding qualia and the rest of it?

You say that chemistry and physics underlies consciousness. But those explain how the brain processes the environment, which we experience in our conscious state as qualia. They do not explain why a universe that is supposed to be purely mechanical also includes the capacity for qualia, rather than lacking that capacity while things just blindly grind their deterministic paths. Poking the brain with an electrode and watching what happens on an fMRI is a fun medical/scientific process, but it still doesn't explain the existence of that capacity in the framework of our universe.