On naturalism and consciousness

[bennyboy]

Once again, our ability to experience reality has no bearing on the actual existence of reality, unless you can show that mind-without-brain exists and that reality is a consequence of the experiences of this mind. You're on far shakier ground than I am.

You talk about our "ability to experience reality." This ability has not been established. What has been established is the ability to categorize our experiences and look for coherence among them.

And again! You seem to be stuck on this conflation. There's no evidence to suggest that our ability to demonstrate reality shapes or creates reality. With or without human experience, matter would still attract matter with a force in relation to its mass.

Strawmen are bad. I don't feel like debating the positions you are projecting onto me.

Just because qualia are not directly sharable doesn't mean they aren't repeatable or reproducable.

Forget about reproducibility. You are not even able to establish clearcut criteria for demonstrating whether they exist.

I gave my definition of evidence earlier but the best kind of evidence is data. Cold, hard data. Data is not an experience, it is measurement, divorced from one's personal experience by way of repeatability & reproducability, accuracy & precision. My personal experience of the data, whilst necessary to gather it, has no bearing on the fact of the data.

It does when you're trying to support assertions you're making about the ultimate source of the data.