Ian,
Exactly. If X has physical effects, then X is either physical or supernatural. This is a tautology.
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What complete stupidity is this?? The physical is an ontologically self-subsistent reality which somehow logically necessitates consciousness. You do not understand what the word physical means!
No, Ian. I
disagree with you about what the word physical means.
You are talking about some incoherent metaphysical definition of "physical", and I am talking about the epistemological scientific definition of "physical". I do not claim that consciousness, or anything else, is metaphysically physical. I don't even know what that could possibly mean.
If you want to argue against the claim that consciousness is physical according to your metaphysical definition of the term, go find somebody who actually thinks it is.
Under your definition of materialism then dualism and idealism must be incorrect, not because of the overall unintelligibility and incoherence and non-cogency of the worldview they provide, but because they would be false by definition!
I think that epiphenomenalism is incoherent, that supernaturalism is false (be it idealistic or dualistic), and that naturalistic idealism and naturalistic interactive dualism are both logically indistinguishable from materialism and each other.
Make of that what you will.
Not if it has physical effects, it can't. Overt behavior is irrelevant. If it has physical effects, then those effects can be observed, and consciousness can be described in terms of those effects. To assert that such a description is not complete, is to assert that consciousness has characteristics which have no physical effects.
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Everything you say is entirely irrelevant because you keep presupposing the correctness of the materialist metaphysic.
The above makes no metaphysical assumptions whatsoever. The moment you assert that metaphysics enters into it at all, you have asserted that consciousness has characteristics with no physical effects.
Consciousness cannot be described in terms of physical effects. Even assuming there are neural correlates for all conscious experiences, you could only ever in principle describe the effects of consciousness, and certainly not consciousness itself. To suppose the latter is to presuppose materialism and this of course begs the question.
No, to suppose the latter is to reject the metaphysical notion that there is more to things than their knowable characteristics. You are the one making metaphysical assumptions here, when you assume that consciousness is more than just its physical effects. That is a metaphysical claim, and one for which there can never possibly be any logical justification.
Titus,
If the physical effects do not exhaust consciousness, then that necessarily implies that consciousness has characteristics which have no physical effects. That is epiphenomenalism.
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Not at all. Epiphenomenalism is the position that the non-physical characteristics of consciousness can have no effect whatever; i.e. no physical effect nor any intrapsychical effect. My position is that all of the characteristics consciousness can be discussed physically through speech and writing. So every characteristic can have physical effects. However, you mix up the position that a certain characteristic does not necessarily have a specific physical effect but can have a lot of different physical effects, for example in the form of many different words and sentences (my position) with the position that a certain characteristic necessarily does not have any physical (or non-physical) effect (epiphenomenalism).
The above makes no sense to me. None of this talk about overt behavior, speech about consciousness, etc... is even remotely relevant to my argument.
What is relevant is this: Even if we assume that consciousness is not brain processes, the fact remains that every single aspect of consciousness which you could possibly be aware that you possess,
must have some effect on your brain activity. That is all that matters. If you know you have it, it effects your brain. In principle, those effects can be studies scientifically, and by doing so, we can scientifically understand every aspect of consciousness that any of us could possibly have any reason to think we actually have.
I do not see how this point can possibly be denied. If at some point in the future, it is discovered that there actually is something, previously unknown, which is affecting our brains in such a way to give us consciousness, then we will discard the theory that consciousness is just brain processes, and construct new scientific theories to describe those observed interactions. If this requires us to reject many of our current physical theories, because this consciousness does not fit into any of our current ones, then so be it.
Do you agree with me that consciousness can be scientifically understood by studying its physical effects? If not, why not?
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No, I don't, because studying its physical effects qua physical effects is not the same as studying consciousness. We can study consciousness by examining the content of the physical effects, i.e. mainly the meaning of the spoken and written words or the reference of the non-verbal communicative expressions in animals. Those words are supposed to be based on introspection (and so are to a great extent the non-verbal expressions of animals) and to refer to our subjectivity. It's completely nonsensical to believe that the physical effects of consciousness ARE consciousness and vice versa. What's so problematic about that, other than that it ruins your untenable position?
Once again, I am not just talking about things like overt behavior, and speech based on introspection. I am talking about neuroscience. I am talking about directly studying the effects which consciousness must have on the brain, if it is indeed not just a brain process.
At the very least, it effects your brain processes, because your brain is thinking about it.
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Even if that were true (and you know I don't think so and why I don't think so), those brain processes can't tell you what consciousness is like.
If there is anything more to consciousness than the effects it has on your brain processes, then there is no way you could possibly know about it.
By the way, you will understand that thoughts about consciousness aren't that consciousness itself, not even if thoughts about consciousness were physical or if consciousness itself were physical. You can't equate thoughts about consciousness (= supposed physical effects according to your system) with consciousness itself. So even within your own system, it's real nonsense.
I am not equating anything with anything. What you have to understand is that it is your brain which performs all of those information processing tasks that things like thought, knowing, introspection, and memory, require. Even if you claim that there is more to these mental processes than just brain processes, the fact remains that those brain processes are an integral, and non-removable, component of them. You cannot think about something without using your brain to do so. Thus if you are capable of thinking about some aspect of consciousness, then it necessarily follows that your brain has access to all of the relevant information about it. That aspect of consciousness must have an effect on your brain.
In effect, you are claiming to know something which, by construction, is intrinsically unknowable.
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Incorrect, I oppose epiphenomenalism in that I believe any part of consciousness can and often does have an effect upon the physical world. The differences are that I don't claim that knowing an effect equals knowing its source as such. Consciousness can only be directly known through introspection.
And introspection is not a physical process,
It clearly involves physical processes. If you know it, your brain knows it.
as otherwise there would be no difference between a first person and third person perspective. Only eliminative materialism can hold such a thing.
The difference is a purely conceptual one. The only difference between the first person perspective, and the third person perspective, is that the first person perspective consists of inferences drawn intuitively about from your experiences, and the third person perspective consists of inferences drawn from your experiences based on some theoretical framework.
In both cases, you have experiences, those experiences either are brain processes, or have effects on your brain processes. Your brain then draws the inferences, either through intuition, or through application of the theoretical framework. They may seem very different, but that is just because, as is often the case, intuition can be very misleading.
Dr. Stupid
. We're human, which means we have a remarkable learning capacity. 
