[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Originally Posted by Ian

I have no idea what you mean when you state consciousness is part of the physically closed world.

I think you agreed before with the hypothesis that saying consciousness is the same thing as a physical process does not (at least to you) mean that consciousness doesn't exist. Rather something like a pain is both a physical process as externally perceived, and qualia as internally experienced. So something like a pain (and all other conscious events) has 2 different types of property -- that which is amenable to a 3rd person description, and the subjective property.

Yes, but those "qualia as internally experienced" are simply a result of a physical process in the brain. Thus consciousness is part of the physically closed world.

The externally perceived pain is that which is quantifiable. It is these publicly accessible quantifiable events which science deems to be causally efficacious. Therefore the innwardly experieced qualia plays no causal role.

Of course they do. Otherwise we could not speak of them.

However bafflingly you disagree with this. So you must either be saying one of 2 things:

a) The quantifiable events of the externally perceived pain are not sufficient by themselves to provide a complete causal explanation for our reaction to the pain -- the inner experience itself plays at least a partial role. This option seems to flat out deny that the physical world is closed.

Why? The inner experience is just an inner behavior that is more difficult to quantify objectively. But this does make it immaterial, nor does it mean we won't be able to quantify it someday.

For some reason, you have elevated the experiences going on in your head to a status that requires them to be ontologically different. I do not understand this. I find this particularly odd since you cannot enumerate exactly which of the things going on in your head are of this different nature.

~~ Paul