On naturalism and consciousness

[pocaracas]

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.

Your belief that spoons are curved is akin to a classification of the object "spoon" with the qualifier "curved". That's why I started with "your example", and not "your proposition".

These "beliefs" you want to claim are impossible to hold as brain chemicals and structures.... why can't they be?
If beliefs can't be held in the brain, then how can memories? visual memories, conceptual memories, textual memories, etc...

Given how Alzheimer's disease affects the brain it seems inevitable that memories are held in the brain.
Can you otherwise explain how memories are formed in the brain?
The concepts we hold can be thought of as memories, too... they too should reside in the brain.
Concepts such as beliefs... I know of no disease that affects this sort of mental constructs alone, so I cannot say for sure that they're in the brain, but I see nothing hinting they're anywhere else.
Actually, brain damage can lead to a different set of beliefs... isn't there a person who had split personality and one persona was religious while the other was atheist?