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The "hard problem of consciousness"
This will be a lengthy post (and possibly too weighty for GenDisc). Please feel free to engage with any part of it; I want it to be torn apart. Furthermore, I think that discussions on philosophy forums usually descend into gibberish and tiresome terminology, whereas discussions on this forum rarely do.  ;)  You've probably seen many of the ideas here, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the subject. I've been obsessed with it during the past few days.

I won't pretend to be unbiased. I'm a fan of David Chalmers (who thinks consciousness is something fundamental, like mass and gravity), I'm a dualist (I believe in the magic essence of me-ness), and I believe that a teleporter would kill "me" (even though day-to-day cell replacement seemingly doesn't).


I. Some Online Discussions
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First, previous HLP discussions:
Let me............... Tel-e-port you!  Starts in the middle of page 6. This one is particularly good.
Peter Watts, 'Blindsight': finally, aliens without the bull****  Entire thread.
On religion, atheism and changing thread titles....  Also starts in the middle of page 6.
Supernatural Elements? (spoilers unmarked)  Starts at the top of page 3.
Well it looks like vegans will just have to starve  Entire thread.

Second, two discussions on philosophy forums that I thought were productive, though quite long:
Is there a Hard Problem of Consciousness?
The 'Explanatory Gap'

Third, some writings on consciousness:
Consciousness Defined  An extract from Colin McGinn's "The Mysterious Flame".
What is it like to be a bat?  Thomas Nagel's "what it is like" description of qualia.
Epiphenomenal Qualia  Frank Jackson's knowledge argument.
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness  David Chalmers coins the phrase "hard problem of consciousness".
Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness  David Chalmers responds to criticism of the previous paper.
Blindsight  The novel under discussion in one of the above HLP threads.

Fourth, an enjoyable comic regarding teleportation:
The Machine


II. Consciousness Defined?
-----------------------------


"Consciousness" is an overloaded word. Its philosophical meaning is not wakefulness, nor is it awareness in the pedestrian sense; some (sort of) synonyms are "the hard problem of consciousness", "p-consciousness", "qualia" (taken as a whole), and "subjective experience". It's also different from self-awareness, which may take place in the absence of consciousness, or vice versa. With that out of the way, what is it?

I think most people intuitively know what is meant by "consciousness". The idea is arguably present in popular culture (see "The Matrix", "Inception", some episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and the upcoming game "SOMA"). Nevertheless, it's notoriously difficult to define, due to its very nature. Consciousness is so elusive, in fact, that one can deny its existence - for which there may be no objective evidence - or label that particular use of the word as "not even wrong", and end the conversation immediately.

Long story short: we can only approach the concept indirectly. Consciousness Defined (a misnomer) is a good place to start, but here are some "intuition pumps". Needless to say, none of them are mine.

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The closest thing to a concise definition is probably by Thomas Nagel: "what it is like to be something". "Subjective experience" also seems to have the right flavor. (The word "soul" is sometimes used, but that's tangled with religion.) Because what we see influences us so powerfully, consciousness is sometimes intuitively described as a movie playing in your head, or a "homunculus" looking out through your eyes. But vision - not the mechanical process of light entering your eyes and so forth, but the experience of vision - is only one part of consciousness. Other parts are hearing, bodily awareness, and everything else that goes on "in your head".

Consciousness is claimed to be a completely private, subjective phenomenon, and inaccessible from the outside. According to Nagel, we could know everything there is to know about a bat from the outside, and still not know what it's like to be a bat. (Nagel chose a bat because it has a sense we do not - namely, echolocation.) Jackson's "knowledge argument" is that we could know every physical aspect of the color red (which objects are red, the behavior of light, how it's processed by the eye, etc.), and still not know what red is "like" until we've seen it ourselves. The experience of red is something that can't be communicated.

Many intuition pumps involve hypothetical beings called "p-zombies", or just "zombies". A zombie is something that looks like a human and acts like a human - in fact, is an exact replica of a human - but "lacks an inner life", "is all dark inside", and "has no-one looking out". It does all the same things a human does and processes information in all the same ways, but has no corresponding subjective experience, any more than (say) a rock. If such a being is possible, the argument goes, there must be "something more" to people than their physical makeup.

Another property of consciousness is its incorrigibility. In some sense, you cannot be mistaken in the belief that you are conscious. To deny that you are conscious is absurd, because it's the only thing you can be certain of (setting aside the possibly related, but distinct fact of your own existence). It is the brute fact, the only possible starting point; everything else, including the existence of an external world, is speculation. To assert that consciousness arises in the external world is to have things backwards.

(Tiresome note: at this level of abstraction, one could object to my use of the word "you", because "you" is a concept that may only exist as part of "your" consciousness. But objections like this are pedantic and stifle discussion. Similarly, metaphysical solipsism, the very strong assertion that "only I exist", is a dead end in every sense of the phrase.)

Lastly, a pointed but thought-provoking post from "I am Charlie" in Is there a Hard Problem of Consciousness?:

Quote
There is a serious linguistic problem with the discussion you wish to have. There are those that understand what Nagel is alluding to with his description of conscious experience as the "what-it-is-like-to-be-me", and those that are blind to it, and members of these two groups have no common ground that would permit such a debate. Members of the former group have had the experience of being perplexed after a kind of reversal of attention back upon itself, leading them to 'notice' something that has not been noticed by members of the latter group. This perplexity has an analogy with the principal question of metaphysics -- "why is there anything rather than nothing at all?" -- and  in this sense: That question normally arises in respect of what we might want to refer to as the "objective world", whereas for those members of the latter group the question arises in respect of what we might want to refer to as the "subjective world". Now, language has evolved in the objective world and has utility therein, but this idea of p-consciousness (of the synchronic entirety of its constituents) has no utility in the objective world, and so language can gain no real traction upon it. Consequently members of the latter group, who are blind to the issue, are also blind to their error in any claims they make about it. There can be no common ground between these two groups, one claiming that the other is seeing something that isn't there, the other claiming that the first is not seeing something that is there.


III. The Hard Problem
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As I mentioned, if you deny the phenomenon entirely (Chalmers calls this the type-A materialist position), there can be no further discussion. If, on the other hand, you think there's something extra that needs explaining, you run into the "hard problem": why do we have subjective experience?

Chalmers distinguishes this from the "easy problems" of explaining (for example) the ability to react to stimuli, the reportability of mental states, and the difference between wakefulness and sleep. These problems are easy in the sense that we know what kind of solution is required: to explain the performance of a function, we need only specify a lower-level mechanism for the function. This is how we usually answer questions - with reductive arguments that explain complex processes in terms of simpler ones. The hard problem is different because even after we explain the functions, the question still remains: why are they accompanied by subjective experience?

(The above paragraph is compressed from Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.)

Neuroscience, he goes on, is well-suited to explaining the performance of functions, but seems to have no handle on the hard problem, which requires a different kind of explanation. Something extra is needed.

Quote
It is tempting to note that all sorts of puzzling phenomena have eventually turned out to be explainable in physical terms. But each of these were problems about the observable behavior of physical objects, coming down to problems in the explanation of structures and functions. Because of this, these phenomena have always been the kind of thing that a physical account might explain, even if at some points there have been good reasons to suspect that no such explanation would be forthcoming. The tempting induction from these cases fails in the case of consciousness, which is not a problem about physical structures and functions. The problem of consciousness is puzzling in an entirely different way. An analysis of the problem shows us that conscious experience is just not the kind of thing that a wholly reductive account could succeed in explaining.

As "I am Charlie" notes, the hard problem is similar to the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" It's impossible even to imagine what kind of answer would be satisfactory. In addition, subjective experiences appear to be inaccessible from the outside, so that there is no objective way to study them or even produce evidence that they exist. Chalmers concludes that consciousness must be taken as fundamental.


IV. A Possible Solution
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This is the best part. From Moving Forward on the Problem of Consciousness:

Quote
Here we can exploit an idea that was set out by Bertrand Russell (1926), and which has been developed in recent years by Grover Maxwell (1978) and Michael Lockwood (1989). This is the idea that physics characterizes its basic entities only extrinsically, in terms of their causes and effects, and leaves their intrinsic nature unspecified. For everything that physics tells us about a particle, for example, it might as well just be a bundle of causal dispositions; we know nothing of the entity that carries those dispositions. The same goes for fundamental properties, such as mass and charge: ultimately, these are complex dispositional properties (to have mass is to resist acceleration in a certain way, and so on). But whenever one has a causal disposition, one can ask about the categorical basis of that disposition: that is, what is the entity that is doing the causing?

One might try to resist this question by saying that the world contains only dispositions. But this leads to a very odd view of the world indeed, with a vast amount of causation and no entities for all this causation to relate! It seems to make the fundamental properties and particles into empty placeholders, in the same way as the psychon above, and thus seems to free the world of any substance at all. It is easy to overlook this problem in the way we think about physics from day to day, given all the rich details of the mathematical structure that physical theory provides; but as Stephen Hawking (1988) has noted, physical theory says nothing about what puts the "fire" into the equations and grounds the reality that these structures describe. The idea of a world of "pure structure" or of "pure causation" has a certain attraction, but it is not at all clear that it is coherent.

So we have two questions: (1) what are the intrinsic properties underlying physical reality?; and (2) where do the intrinsic properties of experience fit into the natural order? Russell's insight, developed by Maxwell and Lockwood, is that these two questions fit with each other remarkably well. Perhaps the intrinsic properties underlying physical dispositions are themselves experiential properties, or perhaps they are some sort of proto-experiential properties that together constitute conscious experience. This way, we locate experience inside the causal network that physics describes, rather than outside it as a dangler; and we locate it in a role that one might argue urgently needed to be filled. And importantly, we do this without violating the causal closure of the physical. The causal network itself has the same shape as ever; we have just colored in its nodes.

All I can say is that I find this very compelling.

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As I said, these ideas are not mine, and doubtless many of you are familiar with them. I just wanted to package them and see what you think.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Everything is explained by physics! Deflationary monist compatibilism is the answer! Inventing magical thoughts to explain unnecessary intuitions is just an onanistic way to hide from the meat machine truth!

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Well, Chalmers' point is that consciousness eludes the scientific method, but need not interfere with physics (e.g. by violating causal closure). Physics and consciousness could be complementary - one representing interactions, and the other representing the things that are interacting.

By the way, I was hoping I would snag you, Battuta!  :)

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Most philosophical questions I find pointless and uninteresting. A few questions I find interesting and as if I can actually make progress thinking about them. And then there's one which I find interesting but impossible to even begin to touch in any sort of coherent manner. Guess which one that is. :(

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I'm also inclined towards monism and compatibilism. However, my mind is open in relation to two aspects. First, in how science itself was designed with an inherent subject - object divide, and focusing on the latter as an "object" of study (while the subject, studies). By this design, it does follow that some fundamental problems might arise when we try to objectify the subject without any loss of information. We might end up studying zimbos (zombies, etc.) instead, and failing to "get" why they are not more than zimbos.

The solution of concluding like Dennett does (almost) "Well then we are all zimbos, what's the big deal", still feels unsatisfactory at some core level.

Here's the second aspect I'm open to. I'm open to an idea similar to a Dunning Kruger effect, related to consciousness. We might be just too numbified by an unknown process that prevents us to understand how we ourselves *really* work.

Related homework: The Semantic Apocalypse

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Everything is explained by physics! Deflationary monist compatibilism is the answer! Inventing magical thoughts to explain unnecessary intuitions is just an onanistic way to hide from the meat machine truth!

I forgot to mention: Chalmers also denies that there is anything mystical about positing consciousness as fundamental. He compares it to positing gravity as fundamental. Nobody complains that Newton didn't explain what gravity is; all we expect is an explanation of how gravity behaves. Physics says nothing about what things "are", and doesn't try to. That's a question for metaphysics - just as consciousness might be.

Most philosophical questions I find pointless and uninteresting. A few questions I find interesting and as if I can actually make progress thinking about them. And then there's one which I find interesting but impossible to even begin to touch in any sort of coherent manner. Guess which one that is. :(

I'm in the same boat. One of my favorite quotes, from Zee's popular science book "Fearful Symmetry", is this (regarding the possible role of consciousness in quantum mechanics):

Quote
The distinguished physicist Murph Goldberger was once asked by a television interviewer why he had never worked in this area. He answered that every time he decided to think about these questions, he would sit down, get out a clean piece of paper, sharpen his pencil - and then he just couldn't think of anything to put down.

Related homework: The Semantic Apocalypse

Looks juicy! I'll work on it.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I've never seen anything that calls for a special, fundamental consciousness — except our desire to believe consciousness is important. As far as we can tell, qualia can be manipulated by manipulating the brain. There doesn't seem to be any parsimonious reason to look for anything else going on.

 

Offline Bobboau

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
but I do think it would be handy to have some way to determine if something had the quality of "consciousness". but I think there are better words to use for this. Person-hood is a good one. Agency is also a nice $64 word for this thing.

My general rule of thumb here is I should treat it as a person if it is capable of expressing it's desire that I do so. not that it does or desires to, but that it can. this is because in order to do that it would need to have desires to be communicated and that it had sufficient intelligence to be able to communicate.
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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I've never seen anything that calls for a special, fundamental consciousness — except our desire to believe consciousness is important. As far as we can tell, qualia can be manipulated by manipulating the brain. There doesn't seem to be any parsimonious reason to look for anything else going on.

I would say that type-F dualism (the view described in the last quote of my OP) is parsimonious, because it kills two birds with one stone. Even if you identify consciousness with something like reportability, or deny its existence (which seems extremely counterintuitive, because it's the only thing you can be certain of; everything else follows), there's still a problem.

Physics still only addresses relationships between, say, fundamental particles. It has no handle on the intrinsic nature of particles - just as it has no handle on the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" Particles may as well be black boxes. Sure, from a practical (and testable) standpoint, that's all you need. But from a philosophical standpoint, it seems an incomplete and hollow picture of the universe, with lots of rules but no substance.

Thus, by identifying "consciousness" with "intrinsic nature", type-F dualism allows consciousness to fill a gap in our understanding that was already present. Rather than viewing consciousness as a dangling, extraneous assumption, it binds consciousness and physics together in a completely natural way.

Here's the second aspect I'm open to. I'm open to an idea similar to a Dunning Kruger effect, related to consciousness. We might be just too numbified by an unknown process that prevents us to understand how we ourselves *really* work.

Related homework: The Semantic Apocalypse

Bakker's lecture was interesting, but I agree with the rebuttal that even if we're currently ill-equipped to analyze ourselves, we may have the tools in the future (e.g. via brain modification).

Incidentally, is "Neuropath" worth reading? It sounded promising.

but I do think it would be handy to have some way to determine if something had the quality of "consciousness". but I think there are better words to use for this. Person-hood is a good one. Agency is also a nice $64 word for this thing.

It would certainly be handy - it would clarify issues like abortion and animal rights - but it may be impossible, even in theory.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Nothing has any 'intrinsic nature.' Everything is physical, and all traits are physical traits.

 

Offline Luis Dias

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Nothing has any 'intrinsic nature.' Everything is physical, and all traits are physical traits.

The annoying thing in these sentences is how self-unawarely they form an incoherent thought. To say that everything is just "relations" all the way down, therefore there isn't anything "intrinsic" to things, etc. (i.e., let's bury Aristotle really deep into the ground and blast him with a nuke to make sure) is incoherent, IMHO, or at least I can't see how it isn't. If "everything is relations", then that's the "intrinsic nature of reality".

This is why I can't take physicalism very seriously, it naively reinstitutes what it sets out to demolish. Give me a hardline positivism over this stuff any day.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I don't understand your point. Imagine an 'intrinsic trait' that has no physical properties and affects nothing in the world. Who cares? The only relevant properties of anything are those with causal effect.

We know that whatever consciousness is, it is physical: we can infer this by altering the brain and altering consciousness. We know that consciousness is the result of physical operations in the brain.

Anything beyond that is a rearguard action — trying to cling to dualism by inventing reasons it might be necessary.

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Quote
We know that whatever consciousness is, it is physical: we can infer this by altering the brain and altering consciousness.

This pretty much. If consciousness was not physical, we would not be able to influence it by taking drugs, for example.

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
Nothing has any 'intrinsic nature.' Everything is physical, and all traits are physical traits.

Well, this view is at least consistent. It's precisely analogous to the view that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and all problems are easy problems (i.e. having to do with functions).

One response would be to turn the argument on its head. The reality is that nothing has any "physical nature". Everything is experiential, and all traits are experiential traits. There's no parsimonious reason to posit an external world; it's an extraneous assumption. The universe is more like a great thought than like a great machine.

Now, I don't believe in idealism for a moment. It smacks of solipsism (though it's closer to "only minds exist" than "only I exist"). But at least it recognizes that consciousness is where you start. To adhere strictly to physicalism is to forget that your own consciousness is the starting point for all inquiry, and to ignore the one brute fact. So although physicalism and idealism are both incomplete pictures of the universe, idealism is by far the more natural one.

I don't understand your point. Imagine an 'intrinsic trait' that has no physical properties and affects nothing in the world. Who cares? The only relevant properties of anything are those with causal effect.

Hence why I said that physics is all you need from a practical standpoint. (I know you were responding to Luis.)

We know that whatever consciousness is, it is physical: we can infer this by altering the brain and altering consciousness. We know that consciousness is the result of physical operations in the brain.

That doesn't follow. Experiential properties may supervene on physical properties.

(i.e., let's bury Aristotle really deep into the ground and blast him with a nuke to make sure)

 :wakka:

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A random thought: another sign of consciousness in popular culture is the observation (arguably the basis for the Golden Rule and human rights in general), "I could have been born as someone else". Clearly, what is meant by "I" can't be my memory or thought patterns, because I'm imagining having someone else's brain. The only possible interpretation is that I'm imagining having my own consciousness implanted in a different body.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
All properties are physical properties, and physicalism is a complete depiction of everything. No one could have been born as anyone else — their consciousness is their particular brain at a particular moment, and the illusion of continuity and 'selfness' is provided by memory. Alter the brain and you alter the person.

Deal insult to the brain and you can change anything: you can alter a man's personality, erase his loves, trick him into confabulating a new identity and history, fool him into believing he controls something he doesn't, make him experience divine presence. There is no self except the moment-by-moment meat of the brain.

 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
All properties are physical properties, and physicalism is a complete depiction of everything.
The reality is that nothing has any "physical nature". Everything is experiential, and all traits are experiential traits. There's no parsimonious reason to posit an external world; it's an extraneous assumption. The universe is more like a great thought than like a great machine.

My point is that experience comes first. It's the only thing you can be sure of; it's "epistemologically primary".

No one could have been born as anyone else — their consciousness is their particular brain at a particular moment, and the illusion of continuity and 'selfness' is provided by memory.

I'm not espousing the idea, only labeling it as an idea about consciousness. I agree that it doesn't make sense. "What could have happened" is an odd human concept.

Alter the brain and you alter the person.

Deal insult to the brain and you can change anything: you can alter a man's personality, erase his loves, trick him into confabulating a new identity and history, fool him into believing he controls something he doesn't, make him experience divine presence. There is no self except the moment-by-moment meat of the brain.
Experiential properties may supervene on physical properties.

 

Offline zookeeper

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
And then there's one which I find interesting but impossible to even begin to touch in any sort of coherent manner. Guess which one that is. :(

At this point I find it relevant to clarify what I meant above: I wasn't referring to consciousness as such (how can we tell if someone is conscious, why is anyone conscious at all, etc), but exclusively to my own subjective experience (or qualia). I don't see any reason to assume there's anything non-physical or magical about consciousness, but that doesn't tell me why the view to the universe is from a first-person view in the skull of one specific being.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I think experience comes last, not first. The physical universe is the most parsimonious explanation - discarding it leaves us with a bunch of useless and uninteresting ideas and no possible grounds for reasoning or evaluation.

I think the problem of qualia kind of answers itself - we see the world in the first person because we do. It's an anthropic issue. I think qualia probably emerge from mechanisms evolved to model social behavior in others - our self is a model used to integrate information and generate adaptive responses for the physical and social environment. But it may turn out to be something else, like a learning workspace or a way to resolve conflicting motor impulses. It's a question I'm interested in - but I don't think the answer will break the so-far universal monism of everything.


 
Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
I think experience comes last, not first. The physical universe is the most parsimonious explanation - discarding it leaves us with a bunch of useless and uninteresting ideas and no possible grounds for reasoning or evaluation.

I'll put it another way. Any worldview must have consciousness as its basis, because everything other than consciousness may only exist as a constituent of consciousness.

Discarding the physical universe is extreme (again, I think that physics and consciousness are complementary), but not as extreme as metaphysical solipsism (which is truly uninteresting). For example, the universe may only exist as a multiplicity of minds, so that all information is first-person, and what we think of as physical laws are actually experiential laws.

This doesn't make science any less valid, but it shifts our perspective. It also shows that we can have a coherent, structured, and interesting worldview without positing an "objective reality".

I think the problem of qualia kind of answers itself - we see the world in the first person because we do. It's an anthropic issue. I think qualia probably emerge from mechanisms evolved to model social behavior in others - our self is a model used to integrate information and generate adaptive responses for the physical and social environment. But it may turn out to be something else, like a learning workspace or a way to resolve conflicting motor impulses. It's a question I'm interested in - but I don't think the answer will break the so-far universal monism of everything.

Viewing it as a tautology or an anthropic issue is interesting (anthropic reasoning is another topic that makes my head spin). When you describe possible mechanisms for consciousness, though, you use the third-person/functional language of "easy" problems.

 

Offline General Battuta

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Re: The "hard problem of consciousness"
There are plenty of worldviews out there which exist without consciousness. We make use of them all the time. A worm has a worldview — although I suppose here we're descending into argument by definition.

I think consciousness is an easy problem, yeah. I am not much troubled by philosophical arguments that consciousness comes first, that all our understanding of the universe is predicated on assumption or that (say) physical law emerges from consciousness. So what?

Scientific investigation of physics is unique because it produces useful information. We create hypotheses, collect data, and use the outcome to generate theories. Then we use the theories to predict new truth — and often, we get results. Thus we have electronics, particle accelerators, cosmology, medicine...you know all this. The reason it is philosophically decisive to me is that at no point have we ever needed to introduce a special case related to mind or consciousness.

Of course we cannot claim that physics is inviolable, absolute truth. It's a useful explanatory framework for our observations. If our observations are systematically distorted, we're in trouble. But we have a powerful, comprehensive explanation of much of reality, and it requires nothing except simple causal rules. And as that explanation grows closer to completeness —

(as we discover that we can alter qualia, subjectivity, and mind in increasingly precise ways, using only these causal rules and materialism)

— it seems most likely that, of all the proposed models, the causally closed, monist, physicalist explanation is correct. Why? Because no other model produces even one interesting, useful prediction! No other model seems necessary to explain what we find. There are no proposals for a coherent, structured, interesting non-objective world that have ever produced explanatory power.