[David Bailey]

Topher,

On the whole, science has not progressed by moderate changes to existing laws - at least not in physics, and at the level of formalism. That may not necessarily be the way the next time, but it is suggestive.

I think characterising explanations as 'extraphysical' may be missing the point. As I have debated with Paul, accepted physical theories have not all been about explanations, to some extent they have been about formalising non-explanations! Newton's law of gravity gave a formula for the force between two bodies due to gravity, but by saying that this force was mediated by a field, it essentially gave no explanation for the force at all. Likewise, QM declares that the outcome of an experiment involving small numbers of particles will typically be unpredictable.

I guess I envisage a new theory of Ψ/consciousness in which certain aspects of the supposed predictability of the behaviour of physical matter would be transferred to conscious entities. This would be a theory, as you say, where consciousness has a special place in the structure of the universe. Paul objects that such a theory would provide no explanation of consciousness, but that need not necessarily be totally true. Electromagnetism does not explain the existence of charge, but it does formalise that way that it behaves. An explicit theory of consciousness might look rather similar.

I suspect that any explanation of Ψ by a small modification of existing laws could only take into account a small subset of Ψ phenomena as they seem to manifest themselves. Such a theory would inevitably have to fall back on the usual skeptical arguments - fraud, self delusion, statistical fluke, etc. to discard those phenomena that it could not explain.

David