On naturalism and consciousness

[Ben Davis]

For me, it's quite simple: there's no evidence for any mechanism of consciousness other than the brain.

That's kind of a quirky statement. Both "evidence" and "mechanism" are an attempt to railroad any view of consciousness into a physicalist vocabulary.

No, the words 'evidence' & 'mechanism' are an attempt to railroad facts into a discussion that is otherwise devoid of them. Show that there's a mind-without-a-brain (thanks whateverist!) because all the evidence at the moment demonstrates direct causal link between brain & mind.

If mind is in fact the fundamental reality upon which all is built,

Again, what's the evidence for this assumption?

...then there's no mechanism, and no evidence to which we could have access.

How could you know this? If mind is the fundamental reality upon which all is built, there would have to be a mechanism by which interactions occur. It could be no other way or we wouldn't see the link between cause & effect that manifests itself in our reality. These interactions would leave evidence which we could access... you can't just try to convince me that all enquiry is beyond our reach solely to cover a lack of evidence.

Your simple assertion is like asking someone to show by what mechanism the universe exists.

Indeed it is. And you know what, there are people working on that problem right now. And all the evidence tells us that it was a naturalistic, physical mechanism.

The reality is that we have experiences, and that we are trying to understand why this is so. Given this, it would be strange to take physical monism as the default position.

Why strange? It's all that the evidence suggests.

Reality must be considered by default purely experiential, unless proof can be made that this is not so

Nonsense. Reality would exist irrespective of our ability to experience it. We know this because we've been able to demonstrate mechanisms which work irrespective of the existence of experience.

The problem is that you are only able to collect information about experience BY experience. Anybody should be able to see that this is a highly suspect process.

Not quite, we're only able to collect information about experience because we can experience. There's no evidence to show that our experience is causal (creates our reality) but it's the mechanism by which we can interact with it and is developed & even improved by those interactions.