Christianity is heading for a full allegorization

[polymath257]

Oh, I agree that there is a *soft* problem of consciousness: determining the neural correlates of experiences. But, I don't see a 'hard' problem. Once we find those correlates between neural activity and reported experiences, I think we have solved the problem of consciousness.

I feel like you're misunderstanding what the hard problem is about.

The experiences being reported (as some phenomenological or, if you're an illusionist, "pseudo-phenomenological" thing/property) require an explanation for their appearance as phenomenological or "pseudo-phenomenological". But how do you get from neurons firing in the CNS to such a bizarre, seemingly "unscientific" appearance that is "out there in your face", so to speak?

When you report feeling toothache, for example, you're not just reporting, you're having what appears to be a feeling of being in pain, an intolerable sort of "ringing" that you wish would just end.

Going with another example, when you point your head towards the screen of your computer, you are vividly identifying words on the screen. Or at least you have what appears to be a vivid experience. You're not just "detecting in the dark". It all appears as flashy to you.

How do you explain the seemingness of vividness, the intensity of the feeling, and such?

And, once again, suppose that we manage to find the neural correlates to all of these experiences. We can look at the neural activity and say 'this person is experiencing a vivid experience of red'. And, suppose we can do this across the board, for all experiences. Clearly we are quire far from this. But suppose we can. is that not sufficient to explain consciousness? We have the correlates and we know how those correlate to experiences (qualia, if you will). What else is required?

In your example, the explanation would be that certain neurons are firing in a particular pattern that corresponds to having a certain experience. That *is* the explanation.

Scientists have found that the philosophical issues tend to not give testable predictions. Instead, they tend to say how things 'must be' when actual evidence says otherwise. In general, it isn't blindness as much as the realization that the philosophy goes nowhere.

But again, something you glazed over here, is that science is rooted in philosophical assumptions. These philosophical assumptions (such as empiricism and the reality of the external world and uniformity) may be "common sense" reasonable, but they are not something you can scientifically justify. You have to assume certain epistemological and metaphysical positions (even if you do so subconsciously) before you can accept the validity and legitimacy of science.

But then the question is, what is special about those positions that underpin science? If we can't justify those via science, but we think they are very reasonable positions to hold, then what does this really say about our worldview?

Those that underpin science take our experiences seriously but not literally. We understand that our senses don't give the entire picture, probably not even a good representation. but they do give us information. And that information, by testing our ideas, can lead to more trustworthy ideas about what we can and cannot detect by our senses.

A good example is QM, where the actual theory is probabilistic and not deterministic or causal (in the classical sense). Most of the interpretations come from attempting to reconcile classical metaphysics with modern physics. But that is a problem: we *know* that classical metaphysics is wrong *because* we have actual experiments showing that QM works. What we need is a new metaphysics that isn't based on classical realism or idealism. but instead takes into account the discoveries of physics over the last century,

Your first statement is true only if particular interpretations are true. You can't establish in a purely scientific way (in the sense you appear to speak of) that QM is indeterministic as opposed to deterministic. In fact, someone like Sean Carroll would argue that wavefunction collapse would require extra reasoning that isn't warranted, and that the MWI is a more elegant and qualitatively more parsimonious account of QM.

Yeah, I know, here we go with the philosophy BS, but scientists have to deal with that as well.[/quote]

No, it does NOT depend on the interpretation. The actual theory allows for the computation of probabilities. it usually does NOT predict individual events. The basic theory that is taught in introductory graduate classes in QM is not deterministic. It shows how to compute wave functions and evaluate probabilities for observables and that is it.

Anything above that is philosophy and probably not productive of any actual science.

The various interpretations are, generally, extensions of that basic theory that provide no observable differences. And because they produce no observable differences they are identical to each other scientifically.

But this is nothing new. Classical mechanics had the Newtonian formalism that encompassed forces acting via F=ma. And the Lagrange formalism had 'action' that was maximized or minimized in any given situation. In a sense, Lagrangian mechanics was more teleological. But and this is crucial, they are the same theory at base: they predict exactly the same observations. The philosophical differences are irrelevant. Some problems are easier to solve using Newtonian ideas and some are easier with Lagrangian ideas. Since they *always agree on observations*, their differences are irrelevant to science.

the same is true for the different 'interpretations' of QM. They *all* give exactly the same observable predictions. They all give, ultimately, a probability for what will be detected. And that is all that is important.