>>934439
>Your self, thoughts, hopes, dreams, every mote of your humanity are wholly described by the state of interlocking mechanical systems, evolving across spacetime, physically composing your brain, your body, the universe.
Either I'm doing a poor job of explaining or you're not quite getting the point I'm trying to make. You claim that "Your self, thoughts, hopes, dreams, every mote of your humanity are wholly described by the state of interlocking mechanical systems" but are unable to create a mathematical bridge (the only type of bridge which exists in the hard sciences) between a physical description of a brain and the subjective experience of whichever person that brain belongs to.
The path you've started down with that statement has, in at least one paid academic's view, ended at the idea that consciousness doesn't exist at all: see the second paragraph of
>>934309
Prof. Daniel Dennett has backed himself into a corner via this line of argumentation and now claims that consciousness doesn't exist. I believe the reason he has done this is that this tack allows him the flexibility to deny all counterarguments without doing much work.
I don't argue that brains do not exist as configurations of physically measurable things or that these brains are not necessary for and closely intertwined with consciousness. I argue that nobody has yet been able to suggest that there is a way to mathematically (symbolically) equate the physical state of a brain, which in theory is completely amenable to measurement, with the subjective experience of a person. This doesn't imply dualism any more than it implies a certain quality of matter which we can't yet measure (though if it turns out that in theory we aren't able to measure whatever this quality of matter is then it turns into dualism or idealism I suppose).
The entire point of the arguments I've put forth is that there is no way to set up two statements of different types such that we can call them equal to one another. A brain state can be perfectly mapped to physical, measurable quantities given advanced enough technology. The experience of a perception cannot be. For you to claim that these things are the same is to skip over the entire problem of mapping a physical configuration of matter to the nature of thought/perception.
For example: we can in theory map out every physical detail of a brain; the locations, momenta, electric charges, etc etc of every particle within a brain. We can do the same for a toaster or a potato or any other configuration of matter. What sort of theory allows us to map a given configuration of brain molecules/atoms/leptons+quarks/etc into the experience of one who experiences? This is the point of my attempt to get you to build an example equation:
(Physical configuration of brain state written down in mathematical notation as every current physical theory can be) = (what goes over here? how do you quantify a thought or an instance of conscious sense data as perceived by the receiver?)
To claim without an argument that everything is physical is to ignore what the precise definition of "physical" is. Physical stuff is measurable. The fact that physics and the other hard sciences have been so successful at manipulating the world is deceptive in a philosophical context as mentioned in my first post--nothing in the measurable physical sciences has anything (at least anything demonstrated thus far) in common with first-person experience. This doesn't mean that there isn't some sort of connection. It only means that the language which we use to describe our world scientifically (mathematics) isn't suited to make statements about subjective states of consciousness.
Can you provide a mathematical statement that encapsulates the conscious state of seeing a red bird against a blue sky? We can measure the things out there in the world (the bird and the sky) and we can measure the brain state of a person viewing these things, but we can't measure the subjective "scene" of a person experiencing it.