On naturalism and consciousness

[Surgenator]

Did you miss the part about people are working on it? Do not conflate "haven't shown" with "cannot show."

Either something has been shown, or it has not been. You don't get to write a raincheck, even (especially?) in the name of science, because "yet" is a statement of faith-- Scientism rather than science. You only get to say "we're working on it" when the conclusion is only a function of time-- for example, if you say, "We haven't finished mapping the genome of this particular species of butterfly yet, but we should be finished sometime early next year."

Have you ever done research? If you had, you would know that it is nearly impossible to put a time constraint on when something will be discovered. Plus, science has a very good track of always discovering something about a topic in the future.

On a seperate note, another requirement of a good model is that it has to be falsifiable. What test can be done where the results would be inconsistent with idealistic monism?

I'd start with the inclusion of mind in physical formulas, with physical descriptions which adequately describe what mind is, with concrete criteria which can be used to establish whether any given physical system does or does not experience, and with an even halfway-plausible mechanical description of subjective experience.

Wow, that is a long sentence with pleanty of conditions that effectively don't answer the question. I'm impressed.

I'll give you the physical monism answer so that you might have a better idea of what I'm asking. Physical monism can be falsified if there is an observations that cannot be linked back to physical processes. Good examples would be: telekinesis, telepathy, or any other physic powers. Also, mind over matter phenomena like a hologram existing outside of the holodeck as depicted on a Star Trek episode.

The existence of a mind is not such an example, because we have never seen a mind existing outside of a physical brain. Due to the complexity of the brain (~1E11 neurons in the brain with ~7000 connections per neuron), mapping it is extremely difficult with our current technology; hense, progress on discovering how the human brain works has been slow. Other observations have linked the mind and brains as well like the drugs that affect neural passage ways and their affect on the mind, and physical damage to neurons and their affect on the mind. With all these observations, it is likely that the complexity of the neurons and their connections give rise to a mind.

P.S. My definition of the mind is 'the faculty of consciousness and thought.' Please inform me if this definition is unsatisfactory for some reason. Otherwise, I will assume we are using this definition.

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(My apologies in advance if you find my self-injection into your guys' conversation obnoxious--which I am enjoying immensely by the way).

By all means join in on the fun. It looks like pocaracas and Rhythm want to be your sparting partners.