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Originally Posted by skidoo  That's not how science works.
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Skidoo - I tend to see red when I see remarks like that - a lot of us are or were 'scientists' and I suspect you might be amazed how real science works! It is often far less clean than you seem to think.
Why don't we debate this in a grown-up manner and forget equine intestinal gas.
Do you really want to understand the reason why Open Mind, Ian, and myself express the doubts about a purely physicalist theory of consciousness? If you do, then stop just quoting other people, and try to debate the problem itself. I am sure others will help you to understand why we favour a non-material explanation of consciousness, and it is important that you do understand
why, if you are to sensibly argue another point of view. Here is my attempt at a brief explanation!
The essential problem is that it is 'easy' to see how physical matter obeying the ordinary laws of physics can create motion (as in a car), create heat, process TV signals, or indeed compute. I have put that word 'easy' in quotes, because in reality there is a lot of complexity in there, but no real show stoppers.
Now we come to what David Chalmers refers to as the 'hard problem'. This is the question as to how you get a piece of physical matter to feel something, such as pain, pleasure, the sensation of red, satisfaction, etc. These experiences are often known as qualia.
I don't know what your technical background is, but suppose you wanted to create a circuit or a computer program that could experience one of those qualia, how would you go about it? Perhaps you choose 'satisfaction' and you decide to write a program that will feel satisfaction when something or other happens. Maybe as a first attempt, you make the program wait until conditions are right, and then it prints out "Wow - I feel really satisfied!".
Immediately you have done that, you know it is a sham. You could have printed anything, and there is no internal feeling to go with the message. So you try to elaborate your program - but what the hell do you do to persuade yourself that your program actually
feels something?
Maybe you come to the conclusion that a computer program can't be conscious, but some other hardware could. Fine - but you will find it is equally tough to specify what properties you need in that hardware for it to
feel satisfied (on indeed anything else).
This is the problem that we are grappling with here. Simply quoting other people only gets you so far - you actually have to engage in the problem!
David