A question for scientists: Primary and Secondary qualities

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Titus said:

That's obviously not what I meant by exhaustive. I meant that knowledge of consciousness should be exhaustive in the mapping of those categories which make consciousness consciousness. If knowledge of consciousness does not contain any notion of what it is that makes consciousness consciousness (qualia, subjective), it is not really knowledge of consciousness. A matter of definition.

Ah, my mistake.

I've explained that before. I don't know what -if any- part of knowledge is stored in the brain. I can be sure however that at least part of it is not stored in the brain, but in the mind (which here is a better term than consciousness, as it comprises at least consciousness and knowledge about consciousness), namely all of the knowledge of consciousness qua consciousness. I've termed this type of knowledge "metasubjective" (or "metaphenomenal") knowledge.

It seems to me that trying to find the boundary between the subset of knowledge in the brain and the subset in the mind would be a slippery task indeed. So slippery that I would be tempted to put it all in one place or the other. But having it in the mind is not commensurate with the results of many neurophysiological experiments, unless you claim that every single feature of the brain that appears to give rise to some aspect of consciousness is instead a receiver for precisely that aspect of consciousness from the mind. That makes the two ideas indistinguishable.

Consciousness IS different from brain processes regardless of whether it's (totally or partially) created by them or not.

And energy IS different from lead and acid.

~~ Paul

 

[Stimpson J. Cat]

Titus,

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
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There is a circularity in your argumentation. You state that as there is a neural correlate to any type of knowledge, the brain "knows" everything there is to know.

There is no circularity. I am not claiming that your brain knows everything there is to know about consciousness. I am claiming that your brain knows everything you know about consciousness. You can speculate about consciousness having other properties you don't know about, but such properties cannot possibly be anything you are aware of.

Even if the correlate-thesis were true, we'd just have a physical correlate to knowledge. It doesn't make knowledge in the non-physical sense any less non-physical.

Like I said, my argument does not require that things like "knowledge" and "thinking" be completely brain processes. What it does require is that you acknowledge that those brain processes are necessary components of "knowing" and "thinking". I do not see how you can dispute this fact, without arguing that all of the information processing and storage your brain does is somehow duplicated non-physically.

It isn't true that we (as experients) know our own consciousness because our brain would know it. If there is any representation of consciousness in the brain (which I deny) then it must be a representation based on the in itself non-cerebral process of introspection. Introspection is the motor of the process of knowing consciousness and if there is a neural correlate of it, that correlate simply follows introspection. It's neither identical to introspection nor does it make this process superfluous.

Your entire position seems to be based on the rather naive notion that the brain is not an active participant in things like thinking and knowing, but instead just some sort of receiver for these processes, which are performed independently of it. Is this what you are asserting?

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.
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Coming from an eliminative materialist, that's really generous of you. I really appreciate it.

Why do you feel the need to label me? I don't even know what you mean by "eliminative materialist". If you mean what Ian means, then I am not one. I am a scientific reductionist. My position is purely epistemological. I make no claims about the metaphysical relationship between consciousness and everything else. Such things are unknowable, and thus wholly irrelevant.



Hammegk,

Key word being "appears". IMO, Stimpy begins his argument at the what came first, chicken or egg, level -- assuming chickens & eggs exist-- whereas idealists are asking what chickens & eggs "actually are composed of".

Exactly. And there is a very good reason for this. In this case, what they are are "actually composed of" is unknowable.

In fact, the situation is even worse than that. Not only can we never know what mind and matter are "actually composed of", we cannot even determine whether the question is even meaningful.

So rather than waste my time worrying about questions which I cannot answer, and whose answers could not possibly matter anyway, I concern myself with questions whose answers are, at least in principle, knowable.


I don't understand why anybody would consider this to be a bad thing.


Dr. Stupid

 

[Interesting Ian]

Titus,



There is no circularity. I am not claiming that your brain knows everything there is to know about consciousness. I am claiming that your brain knows everything you know about consciousness.

Stimp, A piece of meat doesn't know anything. At the very least, by claiming it does, you are presupposing materialism and therefore begging the question.

 

[BillHoyt]

Re: Four responses

That's obviously not what I meant by exhaustive. I meant that knowledge of consciousness should be exhaustive in the mapping of those categories which make consciousness consciousness. If knowledge of consciousness does not contain any notion of what it is that makes consciousness consciousness (qualia, subjective), it is not really knowledge of consciousness. A matter of definition.

And here is the dualist retreat combined with a bifurcated absolutism. The claim here is that if we don't have exhaustive knowledge of consciousness, then we have no knowledge of consciousness. What a bizarre bifurcation. When next we revisit this claim, if we were to have 99.99% understanding of all of consciousness, this absolutist clause would, of course, still be invoked.

The dualist retreat here is transparent. The claims from decades ago were that we could never figure out how consciousness (then defined properly and including awareness of events and conditions both within us and without us). The retreat from this position was hasty when we mapped out how nerves worked and how muscles worked. Then how vision worked. As both the components and the mechanics of all these aspects of consciousness were understood, the dualists were forced to retreat to this nearly self-fulfilling definition.

Consciousness has nothing to do with vision and smell and touch, they cry, it is represented by introspection. Our qualia. Our awareness of our awareness. And, moreover, until you have everything -- absolutely everything -- mapped out, then it is as good as having nothing mapped out.

Why on earth should we accept this self-serving redefinition of consciousness? Why on earth should we accept this absolutist demand that our understanding be exhaustive before our understanding is acknowledged?

In so many ways, this is a "god of the gaps" argument once again. We make inroads on understanding of consciousness, the gaps are pointed out and used as fallacious launching points for idle speculation of lamelings.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Your entire position seems to be based on the rather naive notion that the brain is not an active participant in things like thinking and knowing, but instead just some sort of receiver for these processes, which are performed independently of it. Is this what you are asserting?

The brain is a participant in that it "filters" consciousness.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Why do you feel the need to label me? I don't even know what you mean by "eliminative materialist". If you mean what Ian means, then I am not one. I am a scientific reductionist. My position is purely epistemological. I make no claims about the metaphysical relationship between consciousness and everything else. Such things are unknowable, and thus wholly irrelevant.

Scientific reductionism entails reductionist materialism. I remind you that you claimed before that reductionist materialism and eliminitivism materialism mean the very same thing. Therefore if you are a reductionist materialist you necessarily are a eliminitivist materialist.

 

[Interesting Ian]

Re: Re: Four responses

The dualist retreat here is transparent. The claims from decades ago were that we could never figure out how consciousness (then defined properly and including awareness of events and conditions both within us and without us).

Never figure out consciousness what?

The retreat from this position was hasty when we mapped out how nerves worked and how muscles worked.

What position?

Then how vision worked. As both the components and the mechanics of all these aspects of consciousness

You have not yet mentioned any aspects of consciousness.

were understood, the dualists were forced to retreat to this nearly self-fulfilling definition.

Consciousness has nothing to do with vision and smell and touch, they cry, it is represented by introspection. Our qualia.

Huh? Our qualia is vision and smell and touch among other things.

Our awareness of our awareness. And, moreover, until you have everything -- absolutely everything -- mapped out, then it is as good as having nothing mapped out.

Why on earth should we accept this self-serving redefinition of consciousness? Why on earth should we accept this absolutist demand that our understanding be exhaustive before our understanding is acknowledged?

We understand absolutely nothing about consciousness. Nor will we ever since there is absolutely nothing to understand. Now the mind is different.

In so many ways, this is a "god of the gaps" argument once again. We make inroads on understanding of consciousness, the gaps are pointed out and used as fallacious launching points for idle speculation of lamelings.

What an absolute clueless prick you are.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Ian said:

Scientific reductionism entails reductionist materialism. I remind you that you claimed before that reductionist materialism and eliminitivism materialism mean the very same thing. Therefore if you are a reductionist materialist you necessarily are a eliminitivist materialist.

I'm not much of a philosopher, but I have endeavored to learn some lingo over the past year or so. I read a paragraph like this and I have absolutely no idea what it means. You gotta love this stuff!

~~ Paul

 

[BillHoyt]

Scientific reductionism entails reductionist materialism. I remind you that you claimed before that reductionist materialism and eliminitivism materialism mean the very same thing. Therefore if you are a reductionist materialist you necessarily are a eliminitivist materialist.

I want to echo Stimpy's objections to your labels. Several of us have told you over and over again that science is pragmatic. There are no metaphysical assumptions. You keep trying to force them on scientists, but they don't fit. Stop labelling. Stop demanding the labels. This is as irksome as those idiotic debates trying to force science to sound like a faith assertion and those more idiotic debates trying to force atheists into sounding like a religion.

 

[Titus Rivas]

Different views (but we knew that already)

Stimpson:

There is no circularity. I am not claiming that your brain knows everything there is to know about consciousness. I am claiming that your brain knows everything you know about consciousness. You can speculate about consciousness having other properties you don't know about, but such properties cannot possibly be anything you are aware of.

I knew that already. The main epistemological difference between our positions is that I claim that we do know things about our consciousness, which our brains cannot know. We experients know that we have irreducible subjective, qualitative experiences. This is something the brain can't know as it is a physical system with no irreducible qualia. It can form no concept of qualia. So it's not that I claim there might be a mysterious, unknown extra to consciousness, but rather that I claim there is a well-known extra dimension, unknowable for the brain as a physical system. It's not a question of desperately crying: "It [meaning materialism] is not real", as someone put it a few posts ago, but of recognizing that we know the non-physical aspects by direct first person-acquaintance rather than through hypothetical neural representations of these aspects in the brain.

All this is hardly surprising, as you deny this irreducible, non-physical aspect to consciousness and I regard it as the basis of my philosophy.

Like I said, my argument does not require that things like "knowledge" and "thinking" be completely brain processes. What it does require is that you acknowledge that those brain processes are necessary components of "knowing" and "thinking".

Well, I don't. The only thing I might acknowledge is that a lot of times the brain seems to play a supporting role of in itself mental cognition. I see the brain as a physical computational device comparable to a computer, which supports our mental life during an incarnation in this world. But the real (mental) metasubjective thinking about qualia takes place in the mind, not in the brain as such. The brain does not contribute any content to metasubjective cognition, let alone that it would be a logical prerequisite for such cognition.

I do not see how you can dispute this fact, without arguing that all of the information processing and storage your brain does is somehow duplicated non-physically.

Not exactly duplicated. For one thing, I believe that certain parts of sensory processing is purely neurological rather than mental. On the other hand, I believe there are parts of cognition which I've term metasubjective that have no close parallel in the brain. So it's a matter of interaction, not of parallellism.

Your entire position seems to be based on the rather naive notion that the brain is not an active participant in things like thinking and knowing, but instead just some sort of receiver for these processes, which are performed independently of it. Is this what you are asserting?

No, I believe the brain is responsible for certain phases of perceptual processing, for certain instincts and a few other things. I also believe that it supports certain non-cerebral, mental processes through interactional laws. However, I believe the brain is only active in the blind, mechanical sense. The brain is not the self, it's no experient, it's completely non-conscious and therefore it has no conceptual access whatever to metasubjective cognition and the emotion, motivation and action based on this specific type of cognition. The brain is a machine we use during incarnation for certain parts of our information processing and as a center from which we control our motor activity. In some cases it may limit our mental freedom (e.g. Alzheimer, etc.) and then death can mean a real liberation for the mind.
The brain may be involved in quite a lot of processes, but it's not absolutely, logically necessary. One of the privileges of dualism, especially if you don't dismiss it as a supernatural phantasy .

Best wishes,

Titus

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

In an effort to understand what reductionist materialism is, I found this:

http://www.kheper.net/topics/worldviews/materialism.htm

It says this:

Reductionist materialism, or identity theorists, claim that the mind is identical to the brain in all respects. Mental states are identical to brain states, that facts about mentality are reducible to physical facts, i.e. facts about matter and material processes. This sort of naive naturalism indicates that there is a little "picture" in our heads that perfectly reflects the external world. This is essentially no different to the materialism of the Greek atomists, of Lucretius, Gassendi, Hobbes, D'Holbach, Marx and Lenin.

I don't get the "little picture" bit, but anyway.

Then it says:

Functionalism argues that mental states are functional states (rather than brain states) which connect input (environmental
stimuli), other mental states (interconnected functions), and output (behavioral responses) in a cognitive system by means of
causal relations. Psychology therefore is the scientific study of these functional properties (while neuroscience is distinguishably the study of neural properties). The most famous functionalist was pretty much demolished by was the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle , famous for his hatchet job on Cartesian Dualism, who explained away the concept of mind as a "category mistake". Ryle's arguments hardly seem tenable today (after all, who is the one experiencing the category mistake ;-) Nevertheless Ryle's evocative phrase "Ghost in the Machine" really illustrated the absurdity of a disembodied consciousness (a ghost) interacting with a solid material body.

I don't understand this at all. What is a "functional state"? This description just sounds like a more obtuse version of reductionist materialism.

Supervenience theorists say only that one's mental properties are wholly dependent on the features and characteristics of one's bodily processes (this is also the opinion of other physicalists, and indeed is the minimal physicalist position)

How is this different from reductionist materialism? I guess there must be some sooper sekrit distinction between "is identical to" and "are wholly dependent on."

~~ Paul

 

[Titus Rivas]

The virtue of reading

BillHoyt,

And here is the dualist retreat combined with a bifurcated absolutism. The claim here is that if we don't have exhaustive knowledge of consciousness, then we have no knowledge of consciousness. What a bizarre bifurcation. When next we revisit this claim, if we were to have 99.99% understanding of all of consciousness, this absolutist clause would, of course, still be invoked.

You've misunderstood my position more than you think. As I said before (i.e. much more than once), the aspects of consciousness that are ignored by eliminative materialism, aren't peripheral or mysterious aspects, but the very aspects that define consciousness, especially qualia and subjectivity.

Again, you'd do yourself a favour by reading a thread instead of posting 'original' ideas that have already been discussed pages ago.

Titus

P.S.: Another favour would be teaching yourself some common decency.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Titus said:

No, I believe the brain is responsible for certain phases of perceptual processing, for certain instincts and a few other things. I also believe that it supports certain non-cerebral, mental processes through interactional laws. However, I believe the brain is only active in the blind, mechanical sense. The brain is not the self, it's no experient, it's completely non-conscious and therefore it has no conceptual access whatever to metasubjective cognition and the emotion, motivation and action based on this specific type of cognition.

The brain you describe is the more primitive midbrain and hindbrain. I think you're ignoring all the goodies that have evolved in the recent past.

Now if the brain has no access to emotion, for example, then how can we say "I'm sad"? Does the mind animate the mouth? Do neurological disorders somehow prevent this animation? If so, how can some of these disorders have such a selective effect? If we look hard at this dumb brain, will we find the "man who mistook his wife for a hat" nexus?

~~ Paul

 

[Titus Rivas]

Mechanisms

The brain you describe is the more primitive midbrain and hindbrain. I think you're ignoring all the goodies that have evolved in the recent past.

Nope, as you may have read, I acknowledge that for example (real) Alzheimer's disease is the result of an effect of a brain dysfunction upon the mind. Unfortunately, the impaired mental functions aren't exactly primitive.

Now if the brain has no access to emotion, for example, then how can we say "I'm sad"? Does the mind animate the mouth?

Certainly, that's a basic tenet of interactionism.

Do neurological disorders somehow prevent this animation?

They may do so, yes.

If so, how can some of these disorders have such a selective effect? If we look hard at this dumb brain, will we find the "man who mistook his wife for a hat" nexus?

A good question. I think that various parts of the brain may support various mental functions during incarnation. Whatever the precise mechanisms, all this is accounted for in the framework of dualist interactionism.

Titus

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Titus said:

Nope, as you may have read, I acknowledge that for example (real) Alzheimer's disease is the result of an effect of a brain dysfunction upon the mind. Unfortunately, the impaired mental functions aren't exactly primitive.

But it appears to be the result of the dysfunction of something that you claim the brain doesn't do: memory and high-level thinking. Eventually Alzheimer's leads to dysfunction of low-level functions, but that is not the first to go.

Why is the forebrain so complex if it is nothing but a receptor for the mind?

A good question. I think that various parts of the brain may support various mental functions during incarnation. Whatever the precise mechanisms, all this is accounted for in the framework of dualist interactionism.

I think you're sweeping the problem under the rug. What could possibly happen to the brain in a dualist framework that would cause someone to mistake his wife for a hat; be unable to say "that is red" even though he can point to the red object when asked; or emerge from years of a Parkinsonism trance to become obsessed with old sexual memories? The more of these cases we discover, the more your simple brain has to have functional equivalents for everything the mind supposedly does. Eventually we will have a brain and mind that exactly mirror each other, with the unnecessary claim that, in spite of that, the brain is just a dumb machine.

~~ Paul

 

[Titus Rivas]

Brain and mind

Paul said:

The more of these cases we discover, the more your simple brain has to have functional equivalents for everything the mind supposedly does. Eventually we will have a brain and mind that exactly mirror each other, with the unnecessary claim that, in spite of that, the brain is just a dumb machine.

and

Why is the forebrain so complex if it is nothing but a receptor for the mind?

Well I never said that the brain is a dumb machine in the sense of an underdeveloped computer. Its computational processes will probably still surpass in complexity the processes in most if not all our man-made computers. However, I repeat my claim that if you acknowledge the irreducibility of qualia, metasubjective cognition can't (as such) take place in the brain.

But it appears to be the result of the dysfunction of something that you claim the brain doesn't do: memory and high-level thinking.

Again, that's confusing cause and effect. The brain disorder certainly seems to affect higher mental processes such as memory and thought, as I'd already admitted. But as such that isn't an argument in favour of the hypothesis that it's the brain which did the thinking and memory all along.

Titus

 

[BillHoyt]

Re: The virtue of reading

You've misunderstood my position more than you think. As I said before (i.e. much more than once), the aspects of consciousness that are ignored by eliminative materialism, aren't peripheral or mysterious aspects, but the very aspects that define consciousness, especially qualia and subjectivity.

Again, you'd do yourself a favour by reading a thread instead of posting 'original' ideas that have already been discussed pages ago.

Titus

P.S.: Another favour would be teaching yourself some common decency.

First, do not deign to tell me how to conduct myself. Second, stick with the issues here. Third, stop dodging the questions.

I have misunderstood nothing here, sir. You however stolidly insist that this is a philosophical debate. It is not. You are firmly in the territory of science. You are quite clearly making claims about the universe that quite clearly violate both common sense and all we know about the universe. You have offered nothing as evidence. Then you retreat to a restrictive definition of consciousness which is required to defend your stance. You retreat to qualia, the last bastion of dualistic conceit. You retreat to subjectivity.

I understand you perfectly: you have assertions with no evidence. If I misunderstand, then marshall the evidence for the lameling.

 

[Titus Rivas]

Bye bye, Bill

BillHoyt,

As I don't want to alter my own standards, I will just ignore you from now on.

Titus

 

[Pyrian]

Well, I read your article, Titus. I may be the only one here that did, but I've been looking for an actual argument from you (and in fact at one point asked for one outright) and have had some difficulty finding one. The article is a starting place, and, IMO, a weak one...

It is hardly surprising therefore if Karl Popper (1977) traces the identity theory back to Kant via Schopenhauer, Clifford, Schlick, Feigl and Bertrand Russell. However, there is an important difference which should not be overlooked. Kant clearly claims that we can never know the true nature of mind, only mind as it appears to us. On the other hand, identity theory is usually certain that the true nature of mind is physical, i.e. that mind seen from an objective third person perspective is precisely the brain or part of it. Kant should doubtlessly characterize the identity theory position as a groundless metaphysical claim of a 21st-Century rational psychology.

This argument utterly falls apart upon closer examination, as it significantly distorts Kant's views on neumonal and phenomenal knowledge. Specifically, you claim that the brain=mind position takes a neumonal stance on the mind, but that is complete nonsense, as it is merely a phenomenal stance of multiple levels - i.e. brain can explain mind, matter can explain brain, but matter cannot be neumonally explained and therefore the whole theory is still phenomenal (ugh I hate typing that word).

Kant is certain that there really are phenomenal experiences, and rightly so. But if he is, how can he at the same time deny that we know something about our minds, namely that we have phenomenal experiences? It is contradictory to claim that all we really (noumenally) have are phenomenal experiences of an inner and outer world, while denying at the same time that we know that those phenomenal experiences as such are (noumenally) real. This means that phenomenal experiences as such must be noumena, i.e. objectively (an sich) real. Note that I'm not just claiming this, but analytically proving my claim.

Once again you're distorting the word "really" to your ends by claiming others are making neumonal claims rather than phenomenal ones. Saying "this is a result of that" when "that" is phenomenal is NOT a neumonal claim.

The point is that the conscious mind can only be conscious. It cannot really (noumenally) be something else than itself.

I find this statement equivalent to a claim that blue can only be blue, and therefore CANNOT be a specific range of wavelengths of light. Of course consciousness is consciousness, but that does not mean it isn't something else as well - for example a brain.

However, I repeat my claim that if you acknowledge the irreducibility of qualia, metasubjective cognition can't (as such) take place in the brain.

And if you don't? Do you have an argument for the irreducibility of qualia I can tear into? I haven't found such an argument yet.

Again, that's confusing cause and effect. The brain disorder certainly seems to affect higher mental processes such as memory and thought, as I'd already admitted. But as such that isn't an argument in favour for the hypothesis that it's the brain which did the thinking and memory all along.

It's not a proof, but it is an argument of evidence that such a correlation exists, since the correlation is predicted by identity theory and not predicted by yours.

Frankly, Titus, I am inclined to be extremely suspicious of any theory that adapts itself to new evidence - if the theory is not falsifiable, what use is it?

But "b" simply begs the question by presupposing that materialism is correct at the outset. We can only explain phenomenal conscious experiences by supposing it is identical to some physical processes.

Such assumptions are perfectly valid at the level of hypothesis. Given that we are thus far incapable of reproducing the processes of reason, we're essentially stuck at the hypothesis level except for a few predictive validations - which, as noted above, have thus far supported the identity theory position.

But given the objective aspect of such processes is so apparently unlike the subjectively inner aspect of these experiences, then it prima facie seems implausible to declare they are one and the very same thing.

Speaking of horrendous assumptions... The exact same thing can be said of a computer chip - "a bit of sand can't accomplish that!"

But first of all materialism is extremely implausible and, in any case, this is unlike any other entity or process in the world which clearly do not depend upon any such metaphysical stance.

Huh? The plausibility of materialism is precisely (and, IMO, entirely) the fact that it DOESN'T require some new and undescribed form of existence.

 

[Titus Rivas]

Noumenally wrong

Pyrian said:

This argument utterly falls apart upon closer examination, as it significantly distorts Kant's views on neumonal and phenomenal knowledge.

Huh? I specifically state, as you’ve just quoted, that Kant rejects the validity of any claims of noumenal knowledge about the mind. I just say that in his view, the mind could really be (part of) the brain, i.e. we simply cannot know according to his view. Nothing incorrect about that, as far as I know.

Specifically, you claim that the brain=mind position takes a neumonal stance on the mind, but that is complete nonsense, as it is merely a phenomenal stance of multiple levels - i.e. brain can explain mind, matter can explain brain, but matter cannot be neumonally explained and therefore the whole theory is still phenomenal (ugh I hate typing that word).

Not at all, you’re confusing the reductionist view of different levels of abstraction, held by Stimpson on this forum, with the materialist identity theory. The materialist identity theory is the metaphysical or ontological theory that mind is really (noumenally) a form of matter. So the materialist theory is different from Kant’s view that the mind just might be a form of matter.

Once again you're distorting the word "really" to your ends by claiming others are making neumonal claims rather than phenomenal ones. Saying "this is a result of that" when "that" is phenomenal is NOT a neumonal claim.

The point is not whether the claim is made as a noumenal claim or not. The point is whether it IS a noumenal claim about reality as it is. If Kant says we can in principle only have phenomenal knowledge about reality, that implicitly is a noumenal claim about the types of knowledge we can have. It’s a claim about knowledge as it is (an sich), not just about knowledge as it appears to be.
If it were only a phenomenal claim, he’d acknowledge that he could be wrong on this essential point. The essence of Kantian philosophy is of course that he would be absolutely right about it.
If Kant was just being phenomenal(ist) about this claim , he would be pretty much like the relativist who claims all knowledge is relative, i.e. including his own relativism.

I find this statement equivalent to a claim that blue can only be blue, and therefore CANNOT be a specific range of wavelengths of light. Of course consciousness is consciousness, but that does not mean it isn't something else as well - for example a brain.

Sorry, but I don’t agree. How could it be? Any reason that I haven’t shown to be wrong yet?

And if you don't? Do you have an argument for the irreducibility of qualia I can tear into? I haven't found such an argument yet.

All the same, I’ve repeated it several times. It basically is that you can’t give an exhaustive quantitative definition of qualia, which would be necessary if qualia were reducible to quantifiable processes in the brain. It could only be true, if there were no unquantifiable qualia, not even phenomenally. But then we wouldn't be talking about the materialist identity theory anymore, which -just like Kant- at least acknowledges the phenomenal existence of qualia from a first person perspective, but -unlike Kant- is certain that (only) noumenally speaking, from an objective third person perspective qualia are really brain processes. The identity theory does not deny the phenomenal existence of phenomenally irreducible qualia.

Frankly, Titus, I am inclined to be extremely suspicious of any theory that adapts itself to new evidence - if the theory is not falsifiable, what use is it?

The point is that there are certain theories which can only be falsified by argumentation. In general these are called analytical or philosophical (ontological) theories. Just like BillHoyt whom I prefer to ignore, you don’t seem to grasp the fact that we’re talking about philosophical issues here. Theories which can only be tackled by argumentation or logic, not by empirical evidence, as they aren’t empirical theories to be corroborated or falsified by empirical research.

Ian, your turn to answer Pyrian!

Titus