On naturalism and consciousness

[FallentoReason]

Ftr, your example it's one of classification.
I'm on my phone, so you're going to do the googling. Search for support vector machines. These are among the best to perform classification jobs.
On the other hand, Artificial Neutral networks can reproduce anything they're trained to do... and can interpolate over their training set quite easily. So you don't need to train it with every outcome in mind, just general cases and the network gives a pretty good guess for the correct answer to a new case that can be a mix of the training cases.

I think the biological brain is an ever learning neutral network with a lot of classification mechanisms thrown in the mix.

A cool example of how good we are at classification is letters. You can identify the same letter for a multitude of fonts and handwriting.

I wasn't describing a classification job. I was talking about the fact that we as sentient beings hold these things we call "beliefs", amongst other things in our minds. And in a nutshell, what this means for the naturalist is that this "belief" must be the relation of brain chemicals to something about the external world, such that these chemicals express a belief - a proposition - p. And as I've outlined in the OP, this seems near impossible to me purely from a naturalistic p.o.v.

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The p analogy was confusing as shit bro.

"p", in philosophical terms, stands for a proposition, as does q,r,t etc... in this case the proposition was that 'spoons are curved'.

I'll take a crack at it though. Your consciousness is all in your fucking head. I have no idea what particles have to do with anything on the subject.

And what's in your head is chemicals i.e. the "particles" I was essentially referring to. Maybe I should've used the word "atoms" to make it clearer..

Until I can hear a reasonable explanation, I don't care. I know your identity and personality can be attributed to a few biological factors. Living circumstances and psychology certainly play a role. Does that mean you don't have free will? FUCK NO! I've totally seen people clean up their act, turn themselves around and grow the fuck up. I've seen people deteriorate from a humble well adjusted individual to a sheepish ego maniacs.

Free will is a separate discussion altogether. The discussion being held in my OP is that I don't think brain chemicals can be *about* other atoms out there in the world, such that we can call that arrangement of chemicals a "belief".