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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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You can't just say this and in literally your other reply to me admit that biologists don't even understand how cells work, let alone how the brain does.

If you think we have a solid idea of how and why cognition happens I encourage you to talk to pretty much any neurology researcher, as I did.

The fact that we miss perfection doesn't mean we can't give various more or less well supported theories. To say "no explained reason" seems to suggest that all these highly detailed scientific edifices amount to nothing, which seems excessive: we don't know how cells work in totality, but we have surely at least made progress enough to put paid to any claim that they require new physical laws.

This would be a great argument against the existence of quantum mechanics in 1900.

Sure, but QM actually made testable predictions that explained reality better than the prevailing theories. Where is qualia's Michelson-Morley? Where is consciousness's precession of Mercury?

Surely that would be examination of the deep processes of the brain by neurology and the ability to predict/model complex ideas and how consciousness appears and disappears.

We are far from even this. But Neuralink's grandchildren are probably the answer to your question.

In some sense qualia's very existence is the cloud on the horizon of materialism being a full theory of mind. But something simpler like why people even dream is already something we can't explain and could have revolutionary explanations.

So you're saying that we need new laws because we haven't found evidence? If people had argued this about QM, it really would have been nonsense.

(Personally, I don't see qualia as incompatible with materialism at all. It seems clear to me that mere physical laws can give rise to redness. So my subjective view on the topic is mostly one of baffled incomprehension.)

I'm saying I sit right here, observing an unexplained phenomenon, and that yes, by trivial application of empiricism, it requires a new theory, which we have a few candidates for, but none that can be tested because experiments on consciousness are hard since we can't communicate with the dead or observe the mechanisms of our brains in such detail that we can isolate related phenomena.

What baffles me is that you seem to think that saying matter just has this property sometimes and sometimes not without explaining how and why isn't fantastical speculation.

Let's concentrate discussion in the other thread.