[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I know that if Ian's android was ever constructed, I would have to seriously consider accepting the physicalist view again - I wonder what would push you over into a dualist/idealist position?

Probably nothing, because I think all monisms are equivalent. But I suppose that if you could find me a disembodied mind that I could not localize in space/time in order to study it, that would be interesting.

Do you at least see why Larry Boy feels it is intuitively obvious that mental stuff is not merely physical?

You don't want me to answer that question. I think Larry feels that it is intuitively obvious because he gives too much credence to his intuition. Of course things going on inside your head are going to seem different from everything else, because everything else is not going on inside your head.

The committed idealist should have the exact opposite problem: How can it possibly be that there exist things that are not going on inside his head?

Plotting where all sorts of mental events happen within the brain can give a misleading impression of understanding. It is worth bearing in mind that:

Neural plasticity would seem to mean that a lot of the locations where things happen in the brain are provisional - movable if necessary.

Knowing what goes on where does not tell you anything about how it happens.

Well, it tells you something, but I agree it's only a small part of the story.

You always berate others for not having a theory of consciousness - but you don't have one either - nobody does!

But I do have a theory: I think our inner experiences are due to brain function. The alternate theory is that our inner experiences are not due to brain function. Now which of those theories is likely to progress more in the coming years?

All you do, (IMHO) is pretend that consciousness is something else, akin to a computation, and try to explain that instead! A physical theory can't begin to explain something that is fundamentally different from the various entities that exist in that theory. The problem is that you can't explain the tiniest bit of consciousness from physical theory - the two just don't connect anywhere - but this has happened repeatedly in science - each time a new theory with new elements has come to the rescue - why are you so sure this will not happen again?

I'm not sure it won't happen again. But I'm pretty sure it'll be a scientific theory right smack in the middle of good old scientific physicalism. And I'm also quite sure that the idealism mongers will still say that it doesn't explain consciousness because the two just don't connect anywhere.

It is difficult to imagine is that your inner experiences are the result of physical processes. The question is whether one leaps from this failure of imagination to the assumption that it simply can't be. The interesting thing here is that if you insist that consciousness is different from everything else, then even if science does come to understand consciousness as brain function, you will refuse to call it anything other than the neural correlates of consciousness. You will truly have invented something that does not exist. It will be like insisting that the moving car is only the mechanical correlate of motion.

~~ Paul