Ian,
By definition, there can be no aspects of your consciousness which you are not aware of, and all of the aspects which you are aware of affect your brain activity in some way.
This is hopelessly muddleheaded. I do not know I am conscious by virtue of its causal powers.
I did not say that you do. What I said is that every aspect of your concsiousness which you
are aware of,
does affect your brain in some way.
Why this happens to be the case is another question entirely. The validity of my argument does not depend on the answer to that "why" question. It only depends on the
fact that those aspects do, in fact, affect your brain!
Its causal powers merely refers to its power to affect the physical world. There is no epistemic or ontological gap between the "I" that knows and "my" consciousness, where a causal relationship could dwell.
Nonsense. There is
absolutely no question that the brain is, at the very least,
involved in the processes of thinking, remembering, and thus ultimately knowing. You can try to argue that there is something
more than just the brain involved in knowing, but you cannot deny that the brain
is involved. Not without simply burying you head in the sand and completely ignoring everything which we have learned about this over the course of history. Unfortunately, this seems to be exactly what you are doing.
The knowledge of my own consciousness is unmediated. More specifically the recognition of the reality of my own consciousness is not parasitical on any particular brain state.
No knowledge is unmediated. To know implies that thinking and remembering, and the brain is (again, at the very least) involved in those processes.
You're arguing my position is unintelligible from the materialist perspective. This is the informal logical fallacy called begging the question
I haven't said diddly-squat about materialism. I have clarified several times now that the position I am defending is
not what
you call materialism. At this point I can only assume that you are being deliberately dishonest in referring to it as such.
Notice my position differs from epiphenomenalism because there my understanding of the reality of my own consciousness is parasitical on particular brain states.
Correct. Your position is not epiphenomenalism. It is, however, both incoherent and incompatible with known facts about the relationships between consciousness and the brain. You keep repeating the mantra "empirically" determined correlations between consciousness and the brain do not imply that consciousness
is the brain", but you don't seem to recognize that, even if that is true, those correlations
do still tell us things about the nature of the relationship between the two. This means that our model of consciousness, whether it be the "consciousness = brain activity" model, or something else,
must be consistent with those known relationships.
You have repeatedly asserted that neuroscience and psychology can tell us nothing about consciousness, and that therefore you don't need to bother learning anything about them. But this is simply not the case. To say that science cannot tell us
anything at all about consciousness is to claim that there
are no correlations between consciousness and brain states. If you accept that there are, then you
can not ignore what science tells us about those relationships when you construct your model of consciousness. But this is exactly what you have done.
Reductivist science? The only science I know of studies all empirically observable effects. Since consciousness clearly affects the brain (at the very least, if it is not brain activity it certainly affects brain activity), it clearly falls into this category. I don't know what you think "reductivist science" is, but I rather suspect that it is some bizarre misinterpretation of science which you think actually represents what scientists do.
Reductivist science is the idea that all phenomena can be understood by an appropriate analysis. In other words any phenomena could in principle be derived by a total understanding of the behaviour of the ultimate relevant parts.
So I was right. What you are calling "reductivist science" is nothing more than a misunderstanding of
scientific reductionism (which is, itself, only one approach which is used in science). Your notion of reductivist science is inherently metaphysical, and makes all sorts of assumptions which it is simply not necessary for science (or even scientific reductionism) to make.
I have never heard of any scientist attempt to define the category of things which they study in terms of metaphysical terms like "qualia".
Good for them. So what? I have no interest in how scientists define things.
Well, you probably should, if you want to be able to meaningfully criticize what scientists say. Otherwise you are just babbling nonsense when you talk about things like "reductivist science", or attempt to argue against the approach of trying to scientifically understand consciousness. How can you claim that consciousness cannot be scientifically understood, when you don't even know what is meant by the phrase?
You asked me "How do you define "physical realm"?" (emphasis added). The problem with scientists is that they generally are clueless at philosophy (as indeed are many philosophers eg Mr Lowe).
Unfortunately, not being a scientist does not automatically make you an expert at philosophy either. At least scientists have a basic understanding of logic. That's more than I can say for you.
Oh, and BTW, qualia is not a metaphysical term. Now if you were to say it is a supernatural term then I might have some sympathy Incorrigible proof of the existence of the supernatural!
Riiiight. Qualia is not a metaphysical term. Sure it isn't. OK, define it without making reference to anything metaphysical.
Even if some form of interaction dualism is true, science simply doesn't care. It's all physical as far as science is concerned.
Science is not a sentient being.
Don't be a twit. You know what I mean.
And I repeat, if you label 2 utterly characteristically differing types of existents as both being "physical", this just causes confusion and makes communication impossible.
As usual, you completely ignored my entire argument, and just restated the assertion which my argument addressed and refuted. I might as well be talking to a brick wall.
In fact, science cannot even tell the difference. Science just sees interactions, and attempts to understand and describe them.
Well there you go then. You've just admitted that science cannot accommodate consciousness.
You aren't even bothering to actually read what I say, are you? You just look at individual statements and post whatever idiotic response pops into your head.
I think you may be confused about what is meant by "definition" in this context. You seem to think that by "definition" I mean "complete description". I don't. The definition of a term is simply the set of criteria for stipulating what the term refers to. If you truly do not have a definition for the term "consciousness", then when you use it, you are just babbling nonsense.
I see. So the fact I understand what consciousness is, even though I do not have a definition, means that I am babbling nonsense in talking about consciousness.
No, it means that when you use the word "consciousness", you might as well be using the word "narf". If you can talk about what you think of as "consciousness" in a meaningful way, then it follows that you have a definition of the term. It just appears that your understanding of basic concepts of language and logic are so meager that you don't even know what a definition is.
See, that is a definition.
WOW! I never realised you would be satisfied with such a "definition". I thought you wished me to provide a scientific definition, which of course is not possible.
As I already explained, and you ignored, I asked for a definition of what you mean by the word, not a complete or scientific description for what the word refers to.
Combustion is a sequence of physical events.
You have not presented any evidence that consciousness is not a sequence of physical events.
Physical things or events are that which are perceived by consciousness. But the perceiver or consciousness is not itself an object of perception.
Says who? Am I just supposed to take your word for this? I don't seem to have any difficulty in inferring from my observations that other perceivers exist, and that is exactly how I determine that physical things exist. So it would appear that this claim of your is not only unjustified, but clearly false.
It is not utterly different from all physical things. On the contrary, it has in common with all other physical things precisely the one characteristic which all physical things share: that it interacts with other physical things. That is the only necessary and sufficient criteria for something being physical, and it is the only characteristic which all physical things share.
The power to interact and only the power to interact is the defining characteristic of physical things.
You can define it that way, but doing so is pointless since (a) we have no way of knowing that something does
not have "only the power to interact", and (b) we have no way of knowing that something
does have "only the power to interact".
Consciousness differs from all physical things in that physical things do not have inner subjective qualitative feels.
Since you have not established that this involves anything more than interactions, this is nothing more than
defining consciousness to refer to that subset of physical things which have "inner subjective qualitative feels". I could just as easily define "invisible" to mean anything for which we need devices to detect, and then claim that electrons are not physical because they are invisible. The fact that you wish to arbitrarily divide physical things into subsets, and call one of those subsets "physical" and the other "consciousness", does not have any bearing whatsoever on the actual nature of things. It is just playing word games. I could not possibly care less whether you choose to use the scientific definition of "physical" or not. What matters is that you have not presented any evidence whatsover for the claim that consciousness is not a set of brain processes, much less for the less specific claim that consciousness can be studied scientifically.
What is the distinction between a "meta-electron" and an electron?
The term "electron" is defined to refer to a specific set of physical properties. The term "meta-electron" is defined to refer to a hypothetic object which possesses those physical properties, as well as additional non-physical properties.
Now ask yourself what is the distinction between a real human being and a p-zombie.
Since the definition of a p-zombie is logically self-contradictory, the question is meaningless.
You cannot maintain the questions are analogous without concluding that consciousness does not exist. And if you do conclude that, then there must be something wrong in your reasoning since we know beyond any shadow of a doubt that we are conscious.
The questions are not analogous. The word "p-zombie" is not defined in a logically self-consistent way.
What I'm saying is that if materialism is true, then we would have to conclude we are all p-zombies (unconscious automata).
No, we can
never conclude that we a p-zombies under
any framework, because p-zombies are self-contradictory.
Just like a "meta-electron" is really nothing more than an electron -- as nothing can have aspects to it which are not susceptible to science -- so we would have to conclude we are all p-zombies since we cannot have aspects to ourselves inaccessible to science (the aspect in this case being consciousness).
But we know we are conscious, thus materialism is refuted. Yes?
No.
What kind of nonsense is that? What I can conclude is that boulders don't have consciousness at all.
Then the question here is what is the distinction between us and a rolling boulder??
Well for starters, we have brains.
How are you able to conclude consciousness in the one case, but not the other?
By noting that brains seem to be necessary for consciousness.
According to naturalism both boulders and peoples' behaviour simple follow physical laws. So why conclude no consciousnesss in one of them, but consciousness in the other??
Because consciousness is, at the very least, correlated with behavior. Boulders do not exhibit the type of behavior we associate with consciousness.
How do
you infer that other people have consciousness, but that boulders don't? Do you just assume this to be the case? If you say yes, then I say you are lying. The simple fact is that the only reason it even occurs to us that other people might have consciousness like we do, is because we observe that they behave as though they do.
That's not a correct analogy. The orbital dynamics of an object is directly given to you in your observations. Our consciousness is not directly given to you in your observations.
Again you are appealing to the misconception that any facts about the external world are known to us directly. All are inferred from observations. There is no difference between me inferring that another person is conscious by observing their behavior, or me inferring that a distant star has a non-visible planet by observing how it wobbles.
Not unless you equate consciousness with our behaviour; but then you are denying that we have subjective qualitative experiences -- in other words we are p-zombies.
Complete nonsense. I need not equate consciousness with anything. I just need to accept that consciousness does, in fact, interact with other things. That is why p-zombies are logically self-contradictory. The fact is that consciousness
does affect our brain activity. A p-zombie is
defined to be physically identical to a human, but lacking consciousness. This is logically self-contradictory because if it lacks consciousness, then it also lacks the effects which consciousness would otherwise have on its brain. Thus it is not physically identical to a human.
Dr. Stupid
I never realised you would be satisfied with such a "definition". I thought you wished me to provide a scientific definition, which of course is not possible. 
