Steve Klinko
Registered Senior Member
You were doing good until you just felt like you had to throw insults in the final sentence. The Dismissal is based on 100 years of Scientific effort to fail to show how Neural Activity produces anything like Conscious Experience. Not only have they failed to show how it happens, but they really have not even got the first Clue as to what Conscious Experience could be. Yes, they have measured all kinds of Neural Correlates of Consciousness. But knowing what Neural Activity is happening sheds no light on the Conscious Experience itself. For example, here's what we know about the Experience of Redness:The "logic" is that all we have evidence for is a rather complex mass of atoms called the brain, with a rather complex web of interactivity - the working brain is the most complex thing are aware of. By a long way. The evidence is that whatever the brain produces (e.g. consciousness, experience) is because of what is going on within the brain, the interactivity therein. Destroy brain, destroy that complexity, here endeth consciousness. Disrupt certain patterns of activity: disrupt experiences, disrupt even conscious awareness.
The evidence is that a single neuron firing displays none of what we would call experience, consciousness etc. Therefore the "logic" is that those things (consciousness, experience et al) arise due to the complexity of the interactions.
Now, as to why a sufficiently complex system might, rather than will: I have sufficient funds to buy a bottle of vodka, but that doesn't mean it will happen.
The real issue doesn't go deeper. You can pick elements of consciousness or experience to focus on, but that doesn't make the real issue deeper.
As to the question, my answer - and probably the answer of every scientist: beyond it logically being an emergent property, I don't know. And that lack of knowledge is not sufficient grounds upon which to cast aside the evidence and logic.
Now, you don't have to accept either or both if that is your desire, but other than your personal incredulity, you haven't yet offered anything other than trollish dismissal.
1) Neural activity for Redness happens in the Brain.
2) A Conscious Experience of Redness Happens in the Mind.
The question becomes: How does 1 Logically lead to 2? If you just want to say that Science does not know and assume that it is all some sort of Neural Activity then that is ok. It was the first Speculation that they made 100 years ago. But in view of the fact that Science has made Zero progress in explaining this after a Hundred years leads any Technical Minded person to think that there must be something wrong with the 100 year old Speculation. I have come to the conclusion after 25 years of studying and thinking about this that this first Speculation might be wrong. I believe that the Connection Perspective offers a new way to think about this: https://TheInterMind.com/#ConnectionPerspective