A question regarding proof

[Fred]

I would agree with that to a certain extent, I think we will in time have a better understanding of mind, but I believe the materialist view will be jettisoned as our understanding of reality grows, I agree with the famous quote "scientists finally reach the top of the mountain to find theologians sitting there saying "what took you so long to get here!""

What added value is there by crowbaring in supernatural elements.

None. But I don't see anyone seeking to do so. What do you see that appears to be supernatural in essence and why?

You acknowlege that the the electrical and chemical elements happen.

Of course, because they do happen.

The new neural pathways that make new memories can be observed.

Yes.

That these chemicals and electrical interactions make up the mind is not really in doubt.

This seems to be the accepted view, but the idea that mind is matter has been challenged and those challenges haven't been answered. At best, it's a case of "we don't know yet." That's hardly the same as it not being in doubt.

Just becasue you cant imagine how does not make it not so.

Nobody can imagine how it is so because at present, nobody knows. That's why it's called the hard problem of consciousness, and not one of the easy ones. (Of course, those "easy" ones are actually quite complex, but they can be safely tucked into the "one day we will know" slot because they are theoretically solvable within the current parameters of neuroscience. But the hard problem of why consciousness happens at all is not.

"It is widely believed that physics provides a complete catalogue of the universe's fundamental features and laws. As physicist Steven Weinberg puts it in his 1992 book Dreams of a Final Theory, the goal of physics is a "theory of everything" from which all there is to know about the universe can be derived. But Weinberg concedes that there is a problem with consciousness. Despite the power of physical theory, the existence of consciousness does not seem to be derivable from physical laws. He defends physics by arguing that it might eventually explain what he calls the objective correlates of consciousness (that is, the neural correlates), but of course to do this is not to explain consciousness itself. If the existence of consciousness cannot be derived from physical laws, a theory of physics is not a true theory of everything. So a final theory must contain an additional fundamental component." --David Chalmers

"To explain experience, we need a new approach. The usual explanatory methods of cognitive science and neuroscience do not suffice. These methods have been developed precisely to explain the performance of cognitive functions, and they do a good job of it. But as these methods stand, they are only equipped to explain the performance of functions. When it comes to the hard problem, the standard approach has nothing to say." --David Chalmers

Note that he is not in any way saying that neuroscience is wrong, as he is a staunch supporter of it. He's saying that on the hard problem of why conscious experience arises as conscious experience, the standard model has nothing to say, meaning it hasn't even touched upon the question, let alone answered it.

As our understanding of reality grows so the idea of the supernatural becomes increasingly irrelevant.

True, but our understanding of what is natural expands. A description what was going on on the quantum level would have been seen as absolute batshit crazy supernatural bullshit if someone had been spouting it 50 years before it's discovery. Now, well, naturally, that's the way things operate.

The transition from GTFOoH to Well, Duh, isn't immediate or smooth, but it happens nonetheless. The notion of the primacy of consciousness has absolutely nothing supernatural in it. It's saying that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the universe, and it's hard to get more natural than that, wouldn't you say?

Brian Greene on a discussion with John Wheeler:

"During a lunch we had at Princeton in 1998, I asked [John Wheeler, one of the twentieth -century physics' most celebrated thinkers] what he thought the dominant theme in physics would be in the decades going forward. . . He then slowly looked up and said a single word: 'information'....

"Traditionally, physics focuses on things--planets, rocks, atoms, particles, fields--and investigates the forces that affect their behavior and govern their interactions. Wheeler was suggesting that things--matter and radiation--should be viewed as secondary, as carriers of a more abstract and fundamental entity: information. It's not that matter and radiation were somehow illusory; rather, he argued that they should be viewed as the material manifestations of something more basic. He believed that information--where a particle is, whether it is spinning one way or another, whether its charge is positive or negative, and so on--forms an irreducible kernel at the heart of reality. That such information is instantiated in real particles, occupying real positions, having definite spins and charges, is something like an architect's drawings being realized as a skyscraper. The fundamental information is in the blueprints. The skyscraper is but a physical realization of the information contained in the architect's design.

"From this perspective, the universe can be thought of as an information processor. It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and the now after that. Our senses become aware of such processing by detecting how the physical environment changes over time. But the physical environment itself is emergent; it arises from the fundamental ingredient, information, and evolves according to the fundamental rules, the laws of physics."

See? It's not about adding anything supernatural, it's about recalibrating what is natural in order to account for what is already fundamentally present.