Since you're still confused about the idea of observation and what consciousness means:
That which you directly experience is that which you completely know, by definition. To be directly conscious of something is to know it with certainty. I know my thought with certainty -- I can't report it accurately in language, and since memory is in the brain I can't know what prior thought was with certainty, but I do directly know what my current mental experience is because by definition my it's exactly what I'm experiencing. (If you see the "knowledge" thread on the general philosophy forum, I disagree with Lehrer's claim that I can be mistaken about my thought -- all his examples are simply linguistic confusion rather than an actual mistake in perception of current thought.)
If you think you are your brain and your brain observes itself (self-aware), you must then completely know your brain, by definition. If that's the case, please help out those poor neuroscientists who think they have to study it and don't realize they already know everything about it. Please, if your brain can observe itself that's great, I'm just as eager as the neuroscientists are to share in your knowledge.
Most of the remainder of your post is nonsense since you haven't understood this basic perspective.
Oh, I fully understand it and the attraction of the simplicity of it. I grew up with that perspective until I took the time to think it through and realized that I was basing my beliefs of self on ideas that contradict logical reality. (Fortunately actual logical sense can be found not far away though, and without contradicting physical reality whatsoever.)
Stop trying to imagine yourself as some form of ethereal entity floating outside of a physical body, there is no evidence for such things.
Neither the mind nor the consciousness is an entity, nor do they float (nor do they have anywhere in which to float), nor did I ever imply any such thing.
The mind isn't a substance.
Simply take the definition of the word "mind" as being the entirety of all which we experience... no more, no less. There's no sense debating definitions, call it "hufdahk" instead of mind, or "brain" if you insist although that simply adds to confusion when you call logically distinct things by the same name.
Of course, we all logically partition our mind into these two main partitions:
1) Mental experiences of brain states triggered by the senses. We call these mental experiences the external, or physical, world.
2) Mental experiences of brain states not caused by the senses. This is what people call either their brain or their mind, depending on if they're a materialist or not.
Materialists (that's you, Cris
) dump the 2nd partition into the 1st. Idealists dump the 1st partition into the 2nd. As Bambi explained so well in another thread, you can put the partition anywhere and not be changing anything because you still have the same whole no matter how you arrange the logical partitions.
Your brain is what enables you to be self-aware.
The way you seem to have meant that is a nonsensical statement. You say your brain is self-aware, and your answer to how that's possible is that the brain causes it. Great, so things can be self aware because they cause their self to be self-aware. You sound like the people saying god causes himself.
The brain does of course (by producing thought) enable the consciousness to have something to be aware of. So if you use the holistic "I" and logically partition it into the three parts, you could make some sense by saying that the brain allows another part of you to have awareness of something.
There is no competition between logic and science. Science is applied logic. Logic has no value until it is used.
Logic can be applied by the brain coming up internal experiments. No one went out and used science to prove calculus... rather, people use calculus to explain the findings of science.
If something cannot be objectively observed or detected then it either does not exist or cannot be known to exist.
If something cannot be observed, it cannot be explained. The mind, however, can very easily be observed... it's all that is observed. It can be known to exist through that, even though it can't be independently detected through anything other than logical extrapolation from the self, saying "I have a mind and you have all the same structure which seem to cause my mind, therefore I conclude that it must produce the same thing for you as it does for me."
The existence of consciousness can be logically deduced, even if nothing about it can be known (if there's anything to know).
Let's say I show you a full 360 degree panoramic shot of some nature scene. You would look at it and state that what's in the photograph is all that exists there, since it's all that can be observed. I, on the other hand, would say that the existence of a camera can be logically deduced even though you'll never be able to observe the camera in the picture. I could never guess what kind of camera, but I'd be very certain in my belief that there's a camera (meaning device that takes pictures) there.
