Mystery,
Warning: this is my last response to you unless and until you demonstrate an IQ above that of a bag of roasted peanuts. The JREF forums are not here to entertain pimply-faced adolescent crank-trolls who just want to see how long they can keep stupid discussions going. Neither is it here to entertain asylum inmates who've broken into the institution's computer room. Your mission is to reply to this and continue replying in such a manner that I am no longer torn between those two explanations for your nonsense.
The next paragraph will also be directed to you, mystery. You are terribly confused about physics, an important point in my last post that you assiduously avoided. Matter and energy are two of the key constructs, not spin or momentum. You need to get straight that there must be a something in motion for spin to occur. There must also be a something moving to have momentum. Your photon question was similarly silly. You are reading this now only because, yes, you can see photons. If you really can't, then you are really blind; the point of my sardonic response that eluded you. And, finally, onto my "fake demands." You are on the JREF forum, sir, a skeptical forum. If you wish to defend immaterial qualia you are making an extraordinary claim. If you wish to make an extraordinary claim at JREF, you can expect challenges to said claim. You will be asked to back up your assertions. Each time this has happened to you here, you have danced away, playing insane games. Stop it now and answer the question. Your previous "answers" have been non-answers.
For the benefit of those who may be confused about how much of a non-starter mystery's principle answer was, I'll go into some detail here. First, my question for all the quale-heads out there was that they provide a test that, at least in principle, could distinguish between qualia (as something non-material, non-brain/body) and alternative, physical explanations. Some respondents took the path of claiming qualia are outside the magisterium of science. That's a nice, pat, quasi-religious stricture, and simply supports my contention that qualia are a dualist ruse deliberately designed so that dualists can always maintain their stance, even after science fully understands all aspects of the mind and clearly connects those aspects to brain and body. There will always be an England. There will always be qualia. Mystery, however, answered differently:
I suppose by evaluating the limit of consciousness as quale-content approaches zero
The first problem with this is that we already know this limit if we assume a qualia hypothesis. It is "lights out," zip, zero, nada. So we learned nothing. The second problem with this is, if we are trying to falsify the qualia hypothesis, how on earth would we know how to remove them, one by one? Qualia, according to various metaphysical-fog types have no home. They are ineffable, non material. Where would we find them to remove them? How? If we know where and how to remove them, then we must have tied them to something physical, and if so, by removing whatever the physical component is, we have utterly failed to distinguish between the qualia hypothesis and any "rooted in brain / body function" hypothesis.
Let's go to a similar, historically famous falsification experiment. "Aether" was an operating scientific hypothesis for quite a while. Scientists postulated that light waves needed a medium, just as sound waves and ocean waves do. The proposed medium was "aether," and it was assumed to be everywhere in the universe. That posed a problem: how do we falsify this, if we assume it is everywhere? How can we get away from it in order to see it? (Does this not sound like some poster's claims about the non-testability of "qualia?" Does this not sound like the juvenile question of how a fish can possibly know it is in the ocean?)
Michelson and Morley answered the dilemma with an experiement in 1887. They recognized that, if aether is real, then the sun and earth are passing through it at some rate of speed, producing an "aether wind." Meanwhile, the earth is orbiting the sun at a rate of 100,000 km / hour. They measured the speed of light at different times of the year, expecting to see speed differences. The light should be slower as it was trying to travel "upstream" in the "aether wind" and faster as it was trying to travel "downstream" in the wind.
The speeds measured were not different in spring, winter, fall or summer. There was no "aether wind," and, therefore, no "aether." That is falsification. Michelson and Morley derived a necessary conclusion from the hypothesis and, from that necessary conclusion, were able to distinguish between that hypothesis and alternative hypotheses.
We're several pages into this and have yet to get either a reasonable definition of how qualia are not rooted in the physical universe or a proposal to distinguish between this ghost-like/soul-like/anima- and animus-like "qualia" claim and the rational alternatives. We just get shucking and jiving and claims that qualia are necessarily outside the magisterium of science. We just get the very clear picture of qualia-as-dualist-ruse.
