On naturalism and consciousness

[Surgenator]

These mind subsets still do not explain consistency and repeatability between the subsets.

Why not? It is in fact the organizations of ideas in your mind that you call "consistency." How do you know any physical property or function is consistent? You remember it, and compare it with new experiences. But there's no special reason why the Matrix, or the Mind of God, or a BIJ-generated world couldn't have internal consistencies worth noting.

There is no reason why different subsets would have similiar experiences unless the subsets are similiar. In your monism world view, what guarantee's similiar subsets?

Lets me you ask you this, where does the mind store its experiences in your world view? We know a mind interacts with experiences, and we know we forget and remember experiences. Taking that into account, the mind has to store the experiences somewhere and it's retrieval is not perfect. In a world of purely minds, where are the storage devices? And if your gonna say it is in the mind itself, then please explain how the mind can forget and remember.

ANNs are interesting in that they can allow a system to adapt to its environment via "punishment" and "reward," and I think it's very likely that even a simple algorithm will be able to lead to Turing-passing machines, via brute force, in our lifetimes, especially if people on the internet can be drawn into providing feedback "punishment" and "reward." (for example by having a couple hundred million people rate iterations of a computer-generated song)

However, they say very little about the philosophical reality of subjective minds-- specifically, why there are subjective minds rather than an absence of them.

Great, you agree that neural networks can pass the Turning test in the future. So they are a viable candidate for the explanation of the mind from pure physicsal processes.

We have subjective minds because everybodies experiences are slightly different. Using the ANN example, you should know that for the same training tasks the hidden nodes values would be different (if your neural network is complex enough) if the starting conditions are slightly different. Nevertheless, the end result would be very very similiar.

... if you want a physical model to be a sufficient account of human experience, you must be able to explain why there is more than zero.

Abiogenesis + evolution + biological neural networks, ta da.