Science and the Demise of Philosophy

Right, so you are begging the question by assuming materialism in the first place. The simulation shows nothing if you do this -- it's a red herring, to disguise the fact that you are merely asserting your position without argument.

>Since a simulation of the brain is only tasked with correctly producing the mapping from inputs to the outputs that we can actually measure...

Again, isn't it obvious to you that you're begging the question here? If you irrationally deny that we can "measure" (i.e. establish) the existence of our own conscious experiences, and then refuse to incorporate any notion of experience into your simulation, you are clearly rigging the game in favor of materialism at the outset, not providing any argument for it. It is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it is not an argument for materialism.

>Well, the difference here is that the philosophical types are not clamoring for new physical effects to be considered or anything like that, they are suggesting that the whole notion that we should be able to observe something and test it in order to theorize about it is wrong.

Maybe some people are suggesting this, but you can certainly be opposed to materialism without believing this (I am, for example). It has to be said, though, that the idea that any straightforward notion of "observability" plays a role in science has been known to be highly problematic since the 20s, for basically the reasons that Quine and Duhem identified. It is in any case obvious that we can observe the existence of our own conscious experience more reliably than we can observe anything else, as Descartes pointed out.

>If anyone has any ideas about how to investigate something that you can't measure, test, or find any concrete evidence of other than people saying "Gee whiz, it sure feels like I experience something", I'd sure like to hear them.

I am observing my own conscious experience right now. We have as yet no hint of a physical explanation for why I should be having such an experience. These days, materialism seems to consist of a bunch of rhetorical tricks for denying this obvious fact (mostly centered on slandering opponents as "unscientific" because they are unwilling to jump through logical hoops to deny the obvious).

That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate. The philosophy of science and the scientific method is a very complicated (and unfinished) subject, and crass statements like this just won't cut it as serious claims about the nature of scientific investigation. If you're interested, the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy gives a good overview of some of these topics (or pick up a copy of "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge," or look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem)

> I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason)

Yes, if in that scenario we knew the reason intuition worked, that might make it rational to use intuition. But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?

Regarding the moral issue, you seem to be suggesting that (1) reduces to the fact that humans have a preference for not killing people (as far as I can tell, your vague references to "parts of the brain lighting up" aren't doing any work here, they're just decoration). But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here. (Unless you are willing to be a moral nihilist and believe that there are really no facts about what people should do, only facts about what they prefer to do.)

That's a fitting statement in a thread about the demise of philosophy. If you go to any lab, they'll tell you they're trying to come up with an accurate model, or trying to create structures with a certain known function. Your name for the process & opinions about it are irrelevant. It should be empirically clear what is happening.

> But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?

We did chemistry for a long time without an atomic theory, just memorizing which chemicals should be mixed with which. Of course it was rudimentary, but there wasn't a way around that.

> But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here.

They are statements about what people think people should do. If we all had brains like these [1] it would be morally normal to be a sociopath. Again it doesn't matter what you call it (moral nihilism), this is also empirically true.

[1] http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/

That huge dataset still won't tell you what it's like to see red, though. It will just tell you what happens in the brain when someone sees red.

>It really doesn't, though, unless you already ascribe something mystical and aphysical to this "subjective experience," begging the question.

You don't have to do anything of the sort. You just note that there's nothing in the physical description which corresponds to the subjective quality of your experience. To make it more concrete, there's nothing that explains why seeing red isn't like seeing blue and vice versa.

I don't see any lack of precision. We all know what it is like to see red, or to feel elated. The definitions of these words don't really seem to be relevant to the debate. At least in the philosophical literature on this stuff, questions of definition haven't arisen very often in the arguments between opposing camps.

>[consciousness obeys physics]

Well, to be precise, I also believe that consciousness "obeys" physics, I just don't think that the laws of physics explain or imply the existence of consciousness.

>and I feel the burden of proof rests more heavily on that side, considering Occam's razor.

Occam's razor is a device for choosing between explanations, but physicalism currently has no explanation of consciousness, so Occam's razor is inapplicable. Admittedly, none of the alternatives to physicalism give a deep or satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness, but even a shallow explanation for the most immediate fact about our reality is better than none.