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

[bennyboy]

At the end of the day, all that matters is whether you have a logical argument for why qualia cannot be brain processes and nothing more than brain processes. So far what you've given me is "well they seem different" and "we mean different things when we refer to them." Neither is a logical argument for why qualia cannot be brain processes and nothing more than brain processes. Do you have such an argument or not?

I've never said they "seem" different. You said that.

The reason that qualia cannot be brain processes I've said often enough, and had ignored often enough, to merit an end to the discussion. Qualia is the "what it's like" to experience things, and cannot be viewed objectively or directly interacted with; brain function can be subjected to fMRIs, EEGs, and direct physical manipulation using electrodes. Since you cannot use the same means to observe both qualia and brain function, they cannot be said to be the same thing. At best, one must be a property of the other, or they must be properties of a third system which serves as parent to both. The best you can do is to correlate reports of qualia with brain function, and then treat them as equivalent-- which is what you do.

Note that in none of this have I claimed that anything, including qualia, is independent of the natural universe. I'm saying that since the capacity for the subjective is intrinsic to the universe, and since it has no bearing at all on our understanding of any physical mechanism, a purely physical model is an insufficient description of reality.