Venom,
I am glad you agree that the "hard problems" are still unsolved. I like to think about these problems with the aid of a little gedanken experiment:
Suppose you could scan a brain at some instant in time and transfer its state into a gigantic computer. This is obviously not practical - particularly if you need detail at the quantum wave function level, but in the spirit of gedanken experiments you have to decide if the scan is possible
in principle, and if not, why not.
OK, imagine now that the computer can simulate the time evolution of the brain, and has a file of relevant input to absorb as the simulation proceeds.
Q1 - Is the computer simulation conscious or not? If you decide not, then specify what has been lost by this process!
Q2 - If you think the computer simulation is fully conscious, then what happens if we re-run the program - say to debug it - does the program re-live the same experience each time you re-start it!
Q3 - If you are being super-materialist and have answered "Yes" so far, consider this. A computer program together with its data is really analogous to a mathematical theorem - the output is a foregone conclusion every time it is run on a suitable computer (with any random number generators re-set of course). The actual physical computer is only necessary to exhibit the theorem - but theorems are true throughout space and time! So where is the conscious experience actually located?
Now we inject some possible realism. The computer program can obviously be enormously simplified without damaging the essence of the 'mental computation'. Hormones don't presumably need to be recorded molecule by molecule - maybe a real number representing an overall concentration will do, etc. In other words, the computer simulation might not even be gedanken (except, perhaps for the original scanning process
).
Bizarrely, the above argument seems utterly unaffected by considerations of 40 Hz oscillations, ideas of emergence, attempts to question the idea of a stream of consciousness (all we need is consciousness as we all experience - however flawed), or any conceivable new discovery in neuroscience!
Working through that series of ideas always leaves me with a profound feeling that there is something deeply incomplete about the modern scientific view of the process. No amount of tinkering with the details of neurophysiology seems able to address that hole. Somewhere science has made an assumption that seemed obvious, but is actually false.
To me, the fact that consciousness seems so hard to reconcile with the supposed physical reality, leaves me far more open to ideas like the various ψ-like phenomena, particularly since these ideas are really being rejected because they don't fit in with conventional science - not because the evidence is so weak - I suspect you would probably agree with that.
David