What is it like to be a bat?

Where am I going wrong? If the answer is "everywhere", what's the single worst part? You must at least agree with points 1, 2 and 3, and probably point 4?

If having a thought is strictly a consequence of physical processes, physical occurrences, then physicalism is true, so of course it is not "absolutely impossible", even if it were to turn out that it's not true. By token-identity -- which is one but not the only possible model -- the brain being in some specific physical state is synonymous with having some specific thought--that's all ... the brain being in that specific state is coincident with having that specific thought. Word games about "reference" don't change that. The language we use to talk about brain states is very different from the language we use to talk about thoughts because they are very different conceptual frameworks for describing what happen to be the same occurrence. We describe thoughts as being about things, not in terms of activation levels, synapses firing, etc., and we talk about brain states in terms the latter, not in terms of being about tigers etc., but that doesn't mean that these totally different sorts of descriptions aren't about the same physical occurrence. When you have a specific thought about a tiger, your brain is in a specific configuration, and if it weren't then you wouldn't be having that specific thought. That's what token identity means ... each mental state corresponds directly to a physical state of the brain.

> Physicalism says the word "thought" and the phrase "a particular stimulation of neural fibers" refer to the same thing (from document above)

Here is what it actually says:

> The identity-thesis is a version of physicalism: it holds that all mental states and events are in fact physical states and events. But it is not, of course, a thesis about meaning: it does not claim that words such as ‘pain’ and ‘after-image’ may be analyzed or defined in terms of descriptions of brain-processes. (That would be absurd.) Rather, it is an empirical thesis about the things in the world to which our words refer: it holds that the ways of thinking represented by our terms for conscious states, and the ways of thinking represented by some of our terms for brain-states, are in fact different ways of thinking of the very same (physical) states and events. So ‘pain’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a stimulation of the neural fibers’ (just as ‘lightning’ doesn’t mean ‘such-and-such a discharge of electricity’); yet, for all that, the two terms in fact refer to the very same thing.

And yet the sort of analysis that points out as absurd is exactly the sort of analysis you are attempting.

> You cannot analyze a neural state with a brain scan and find a reference to a tiger. You will see a bunch of chemical and electrical states, nothing more. You will not see the object of the thought.

Says who? Of course we don't currently don't have such technology, but at some time in the future we may be able to analyze a brain scan and determine that the subject is thinking of a tiger. (This may well turn out not to be feasible if only token-identity holds but not type-identity ... thoughts about similar things need not correspond to similar brain states.)

Saying that we only see a bunch of chemical and electrical states is the most absurd naive reductivist denial of inference possible. When we look at a spectrogram, all we see is colored lines, yet we are able to infer what substances produced them. When we look at an oscilloscope, we will see a bunch of curves. etc. Or take the examples at the beginning of the paper ... "a particular cloud is, as a matter of fact, a great many water droplets suspended close together in the atmosphere; and just as a flash of lightning is, as a matter of fact, a certain sort of discharge of electrical energy" -- these are different levels and frameworks of description. Look at a photograph or a computer screen up close and you will see pixels or chemical arrangements. To say that you will see "nothing more" is to deny the entirety of science and rational thought. One can just as well talk about windows, titles, bar charts, this comment on a computer screen as referring to things but the pixel states of the screens that are coincident with them don't and thereby foolishly, absurdly, think that one has defeated physicalism

Enough with the terrible arguments and shoddy thinking. You're welcome to them ... I reject them.

Over and out.

If meaning is given, it's a structural property of mind and is encoded in brain like any other structural property.

> The whole point of being conscious is being aware of yourself, and then using that awareness to direct your actions.

Well,

1) You are making the massive, and quite likely incorrect, assumption that consciousness evolved by itself for a purpose - that it does have a "point". It may well be that consciousness - ability to self-observe - is just a natural side effect of having a capable bird- or mammal-like brain, and talking about the "point" of consciousness therefore makes no sense. It'd be like asking what is the functional point of a saucepan making a noise when you hit it.

2) Notwithstanding 1), being self-aware (having cognitive access to your internal thoughts) does have a value, in that it allows your brain to then utilize it's cognitive abilities to make better decisions ("should I walk across that frozen pond, or maybe better not?"), but this bringing-to-bear of learned experience to make better decisions is still a 100% mechanical process. Your brain is making a "decision" (i.e. predicting a motor cortex output that may make you move or do something), but this isn't "free will" - it's just the survival benefit of a brain evolved to predict. You as an organism in the environment may be seen by an outside observer to be making smart "decisions", but these decisions aren't some mystical "free will" but rather just a highly evolved organism making good use of past experience to survive.

> We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.

That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term to refer to all of the above (which is the problem with discussing consciousness - it's an overloaded ill-defined word, and people don't typically define what they are actually talking about).

If we make this distinction between consciousness, defined as ability to self-observe, and subjective qualia (what something feels like), then it seems there is little reason to doubt that others reporting conscious awareness really are aware of what they are reporting, and anyways given common genetics and brain anatomy it'd be massively unexpected if one (healthy) person had access to parts of their internal state and others didn't.

> Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.

Perhaps the medical condition of "blindsight" gives some insight - where damage to the visual cortex can result in people having some proven visual ability but no conscious awareness of it. They report themselves as blind, but can be tasked with walking down a cluttered corridor and manage to navigate the obstacles nonetheless. They have lost visual consciousness due to brain damage, but retain at least some level of vision.