‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

If I had spent more time on it, I might have noticed that in your reply upthread to thephyber, you had written "I'm obviously talking about the concepts we use to think about reality, not about the words we use to describe it." You are entitled to have some fun pointing out that you had already anticipated the paragraph in which I bring up the arbitrariness of language.

That is not to say, however, that there is nothing to see here. We represent, communicate and reason about concepts, including concepts about reality and the real world, with languages that are arbitrary in their syntax and grammar. In addition, large swaths of factual knowledge about the real world can be learned through language alone (for example, it is the only way that I have come to know anything about atomic and subatomic physics). Given these facts, a rational person is entirely justified in doubting your claim that neither arrangements of atoms, nor anything else physical, are capable of having (or giving to concepts) the likeness to reality that your argument is predicated on.

In the case of the mind/matter debate, the question is whether minds are physical processes, not whether they are physical objects. If having a pattern disqualifies a process from being physical, then even simple processes such as resonance would not count as physical, leading to the question of what, if anything, counts as a physical process?

You are correct when you say "You can abstractly describe the pattern of a crystal without looking at a crystal", but that is what physics does with everything in its domain! If you were to say that physics describes and explains the physical but not itself physical, I might even agree, but that is not the issue under discussion in the mind/matter debate.

With regard to your question about the bird, what do you suppose a 'yes' answer would imply, and ditto for a 'no'? It is unclear to me that this question would have any relevance to the one you follow it with, yet you present it as if an answer to the first question would settle the second.

A bird watching Fallout and pressing keys on your keyboard with its beak is not participating in the story of Fallout the way you are. You are watching a story and tracking a narrative and making decisions about which keys to press. But this is a bit of an obscure analogy.

Let me try a different one. You just sat down in your favorite chair after a long day of work, and you ask your young son to please bring you a cold drink from the refrigerator. He cheerfully runs to the refrigerator, grabs a beverage, and runs back to you, handing it to you.

The process of you vibrating your vocal cords which make a physical vibration of air that goes into his ear and vibrates his eardrum that then sends impulses to his brain and, later, his body that end up with you holding a cold beverage in your hand...those are all physical processes. But the relationships between sounds and "words", between words and sentences, between sentences and movement...none of that is physical. The relationship with your son obviously has a physical component, but the meaning behind your genetic connection to your son is largely metaphysical.

Another analogy: if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? I am firmly in the camp of "no". Does the tree create vibrating air waves when it falls and hits the ground? Of course. But a "sound" is an abstraction that forms in the mind of someone who is there watching (and more importantly, hearing!) the tree hit the ground. That "sound" is a metaphysical concept that we map onto the physical world, and the ability to make these distinctions, to categorize our incoming sensory input, is what enables us to perceive anything at all. Without that structuring, categorizing, and filtering of incoming data, the world would be overwhelming and we would be paralyzed.

Am I a solipsist who only believes that what is in my mind is "real" and that the physical world around me is an illusion? No. The first and best lesson I ever had that the physical world is real is getting punched in the face. That will knock solipsism right off the list of being a possible worldview.

I believe reality is an interplay of concepts and physical, "potential" or "raw" matter.

One more analogy: cooking. When I want to make bread, for example, I have a recipe, which is a concept. It is an abstract concept of how to transform raw materials into a new thing: bread. So you gather raw ingredients, and you combine them following a particular order. You let the yeast feed on the sugars and make nice little CO2 bubbles in your dough, causing it to rise. You then put it in the oven and after some heat and time, you remove what used to be flour, water, and yeast, and you put it on the counter to cool. It has been transformed and you call it "bread".

The classic materialist move is to now just say "yeah but it's just flour, water, and yeast." Which is physically true. However, those ingredients have specific interactions that happen when combined, and further interactions that happen when exposed to high heat for a certain duration of time, and when we remove it from the oven, we don't say "come get some flour, water, and yeast that have been transformed through chemical processes, heat, and time!" No. It has a new name now. It has switched categories. It has changed ontological levels and changed from three ingredients into a new identity: bread.

Now I'm hungry for some toast.