Western thinking - of course it exists - has so clogged up people's brains that it takes an immense epistemological effort to rise from the frog's perspective and build up the maximum distance in order to understand these things.
The power of the factual is immense and prevents us from taking on other perspectives. It also prevents you from wanting to take on different perspectives and from wanting to learn. People resist any epistemological change. That is more than understandable.

Maybe read my post here (https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14959/epistemology-anthropic-relativism) then you will understand my epistemological position.
Furthermore, I assume that we are the ones who interpret the world using our neural means. So there is no 'objective' ontology.
The ontology that we are able to construct leads to the classical physics of the mesocosm. The microworld is 'too small' for us to be able to construct an ontology that is adequate for us.
Both classical and quantum phasic are constructions. In classical physics it takes the form of an ontology; in quantum physics it remains phenomenology.

The transfer of the quantum world to the mesoworld meant philosophy, not technology, example structural realism. Please read carefully!

If you just label my arguments but don't address them further, further discussion makes no sense.

I argue purely logically by saying that we are neuronally established in this world and act here exclusively in this modality. That means we sit in this neural bubble. There is nothing else for us, otherwise we could perhaps switch back and forth between two or more modalities.
If there is no other 'world' for us, then there is nothing behind this world of ours, so there is no meta-physics.
I understand that this argument destroys all dreams of a better, otherworldly world.

I base myself on the fact that we are transforming the world and therefore there cannot be another (for us).
For me, metaphysics is that other world 1 that does not exist for us and therefore there is and cannot be any metaphysics. We have to come to terms with the fact that we can only ever act neurally instantiated, so that every argument is ultimately always tautological. The only question is, can you justify it or just assert it?

I provide an explanation for the fact that metaphysics does not exist

Not at all, while others say that one can know the world or not, I provide a justification, and that is: Every existent is instantiated in the world with its modality and interacts with it by means of this modality.

I only used the photon example to illustrate how relative our existence is. Panpsychism is completely far from my mind.
You have probably understood that World 1 is only an auxiliary mental construct. World 1 as such does not exist (for us).
What I mean to say is that what we call cognition refers to this bubble in which we live as neural beings. Flammarion's wood engraving symbolizes this bubble, from which we cannot escape.
What is the consequence of my epistemology? Instrumentalism, constructivism, genetic epistemology and rejection of everything esoteric and religious. Long live the bubble and we should take care of it.

"...whatever exists must accommodate both minds and brains..."
No, that is exactly the dualism that we cannot get out of our thinking. The brain and the mind are not both up there in the head. Depending on who examines it, they call it a brain or a mind. Both together don't work.

You can investigate anything scientifically. But you cannot scientifically answer questions that are asked incorrectly.
Many believe that one can combine the first and third person perspectives of consciousness simply because they are the same term, consciousness. But both have nothing to do with each other, they are completely different levels.
You cannot objectify qualia, therefore you cannot examine them scientifically.
The phenomenologists can't do it either, they just don't know it yet. :wink:

Read my article here: https://medium.com/neo-cybernetics/cars-and-technology-or-the-mind-body-problem-7ec2b50748c2
Maybe then you'll understand better what I mean.

I would explain it like this: in a universe full of matter, which is described using physics, a special form has emerged. To describe this requires a specific discipline.
Imagine you have a large machine that you describe using mechanics. There is a tiny clockwork in this machine. For this you need precision mechanics. Both are based on the same laws of nature. But you couldn't describe this tiny clock using 'rough mechanics'. The example is not accurate, because life means that there is an active agent that physics cannot represent. It has no concepts for it.

For Laszlo the system exists; he does not distinguish between living and inanimate nature. For me, this is a difference that unfortunately is not made in science and philosophy, at least not ontologically and therefore methodologically. You cannot use physics to explain the special case of 'life'. This requires a special perspective, namely that of biology or better: metabiology.

Just as life is a special case of matter, metabiology is a special case of metaphysics.

I have developed my own approach over the years, the best place to look is on my website: dr-stegemann.de
You can have it translated.
I see the difference between biology and metabiology in the fact that biology as an individual science has a direct angle, metabiology (based on the term metaphysics) has a more general one. I deliberately used the term metabiology of mind to make it clear that metaphysics is not sufficient to explain the specificity of all living things and especially of consciousness. After all, it is not physics that describes life, but biology. And there is only one brain and it is organic and not spiritual.

So you mean you have a brain and there's still a mind in there? Even Descartes couldn't find it.
Or do you think there are two descriptions of the same thing, one physiological and one psychological (or philosophical). In any case, I only have one brain and there's nothing extra in it.
If you talk about two levels of description, be advised that you cannot establish a causal relationship between the two, that is nonsensical. Unfortunately, philosophy has been doing this for two and a half thousand years. It is an apparent dualism that does not exist in reality. One must not confuse description and reality. There is no causality between physiology and psychology. I won't discuss this any further here.

I have problems with terms like "nature as a programmer" or "meaning", "information" or "software". We must not make the mistake of ontologizing our concepts as if they were properties of nature. They are just labels.
My concept of adaptive random walk sounds very similar. And: I distance myself from the four E's (enactivism, embeddedness, embodiment, extended mind), solely because of a very unclean methodology.
I try not to impose my concepts on nature, but to model them conceptually.
But thanks for the link.
Overall, I have similar ideas, including Chaitin and the others mentioned.

I think Pattee is connecting conceptual worlds here that have nothing to do with each other. When we speak of the genetic code, we mean that nature has developed a system from which certain things emerge. Because we don't know exactly what's going on, we call it code. It is not really a code in the information-theoretic sense, because there is neither a sender nor a receiver.
It is completely different in the cultural area. There, for example, a certain social meaning is encoded in the four letters of the word love. There is a sender here, namely society, and a receiver, namely the individual.
In my opinion, Pattee makes the mistake of assigning human concepts to nature. Nature knows no meanings and therefore no semiotics. Nor does it know any information, by the way. Therefore, when I use the term information, I always add that it is actually structure. Because the term information leads to the same misunderstandings as those contained in the term biosemiotics.

The question that can be asked of biological life is why does life move on its own and why does it do so in a structured manner.
Two possible answers are conceivable, each of which can be assigned to an epistemic-methodological direction:
1. The complexity of life is simply the assemblage of elements working together according to physical rules. Your collaboration is always traceable back to the individual elements. The fact that life behaves 'sensibly' in the sense that it is capable of surviving is due to the selection of random mutations.
2. Individual elements combine to form complex structures that each work differently than is justified by the properties of the individual elements. Each level of complexity yields new traits after passing through regime-changing tipping points. While physical laws are sufficient to describe 1., new categories are needed to describe 2., namely biological and biological laws that are not already expressed by physical laws.
If, for example, thermodynamics is used to describe physical processes, it must be transformed into biological categories for 2. Example: a trajectory is then not a point towards which the physical system runs, but the point itself is a biological reaction center with high information density (in the sense of structure density) that is constantly changing.
To what extent a description with physical terms makes sense here, even if they have been transformed, remains to be seen. In any case, they are no longer the original terms of thermodynamics.

With his dissipative structures, Prigogine further developed thermodynamics and formulated an ontological principle. But if you want to understand life 'from the inside', this is not enough. Thermodynamics does not explain that autocatalytic process, nor does it explain the steering and control instance that life implies.
Dead matter is passive, living matter is active. This is something completely different. The question of why I don't go for a walk but read a book can only be described with thermodynamics on a very general and abstract level that doesn't really understand the specifics.

Thermodynamics is a concept in physics. However, physics is not suitable for describing living systems. Because life follows other organizational principles than inanimate nature. Life is self-sustaining through autocatalysis.
Physical descriptions, even if intended ontologically, do not capture the specificity of life.
And it's not just about self-organization, but about how this is 'controlled'. The structural density I'm talking about is, so to speak, the inner core of life. Various attributes are ascribed to it, soul, I, spirit or - as I said - (free) will.

It's always the same nonsensical questions because one tends to ontologize the own phenomenology. That is unscientific. If you want to know why we experience something, ask evolution. It will tell you that we experience something because it serves the orientation of living beings in their environment - like a navigation system. So it's not a mystery, it's just reality.
It's only mystical because it's us who experience something. And that quickly leads us to the idea that such a great experience must contain something mysterious, something metaphysical. But it doesn't. It is nothing more than an art-specific excitability of nerves that converge into a central nervous system.

sorry, ich sollte den Übersetzer nicht verwenden.

The west is stupid as bean straw. In 2014, the Maidan riots are escalated, conscious of the fact that the Crimea for Russia is of central strategic importance.
Today China is warned to deliver arms to Russia, but you deliver weapons to Ukraine yourself. Stupidity has always been dangerous and led to a world war every time.

very easy, consciousness ist no physical but a philosophical category.

One should consider the term reductionism in a differentiated way. Those who cannot imagine the mundane physiological activity producing consciousness, or seek some intermediate step, are quick to speak of reductionism. Such nonsensical themes as the serious problem of consciousness then arise from the rejection of it.

Now what is reductionism? This is legitimate in physics, because there you can always (at least mentally) reduce complexities to their individual parts.
Very different from all living things. This can only be explained as a structure, so from the outset it is not just more than the sum of its parts, it is something completely different from the sum. Central nervous systems are very different from protein synthesis. The term strong emergence is actually still too weak for this.

Emergence is not only a higher quantity, complexity or sophistication, but it brings new principles into play.
However, life is already emergent insofar as it can only be called life as a combination of individual parts and functions as such.

However, physics has no suitable categories for life that could explain the movement, change and development of a self-active system with its own will.
Here people like to ask whether physics should not have any justification in relation to life. Of course it has, but not by being able to explain the structure called life, but by exploring the relationships between the individual parts (biophysics).

That is, the question of how physiology creates consciousness is not a physical one.
And the question of how a single individual being feels, certainly not.

Read my post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13876/mind-body-problem/p1 then you will know what I mean (or not).:zwinkern:

You put yourself at the center of your considerations and start with the thinking. This is arbitrary and only works with logic. Why not start with things and follow along. When you do that, you see how life created central nervous systems, and these finally made consciousness possible. This is not a medical consideration, but an ontological one, i.e. what philosophy should do.
And that consciousness you can look at and measure it. But what you cannot do is experience what belongs to others. Others can tell you verbally what they are experiencing, but you cannot feel it.
The idea that this experience can be described in physical terms is nonsense, because experience is neither a physical nor a biological concept. If you want to translate this experience into biological terms, it is nervous excitement. And you can only feel this yourself.

Qualia and reductionism
The problem can be solved quite simply by
1. Depicting the difference between life and inanimate nature
2. Realize that subjective experience from the first person perspective cannot be scientifically investigated
To 1. Life is already a structural concept and life is structure in that it can only be explained by the interaction of 'dead' building blocks. When we speak of life, we mean a system and not individual elements, because life is not represented in any single element.
However, physics only describes 'dead' matter, i.e. individual elements, so it cannot describe life with its rules. Trying to reduce life to physics must therefore fail. This applies not only to life in general, but to all expressions of life, including consciousness. Consciousness is a property of the individual, more precisely, of the brain.
Biologically, consciousness can be described as the orientation performance of a (central nervous) living being.
So whoever tries to explain consciousness physically commits a category error.
To 2. Consciousness is thinking and feeling, in general: experiencing. You can observe and measure this from the outside, you can experience it from the inside. But this experience is subjective. Nobody can feel my pain, it's my own pain and therefore you can't objectify it except by means of statistical correlations, but that's something completely different.
Conclusion: the hard problem of consciousness is a chimera! See: dr-stegemann.de

The fault of many, if not most, philosophies is that they start with thinking and not with things. The Kantian question, for example, what can I know, places the human being as an abstraction, as it were as a pure spirit that, like a machine, can think about God and the world in a pure form. This idealized, individualized fictional human does not exist.
The starting point of every discussion must be the human being that has become biologically and socially.
Then the Kantian question is posed in a completely different way, and so is the answer to it.
So there is not man per se, but a priori the biological and social man. And this must be used as the starting point of all thinking.
While abstractions are possible a posteriori in science, as a prerequisite of an ontology they are not.
Man's biological dimension means that his relationship to the world is not that of a reader to a book. We transform the world into a neural modality and construct it with it, i.e. not only do we write this book ourselves, we also make the ink for it ourselves.

How about the following consideration: Of course there is an external reality, I notice that at the latest when I drive my car in front of a tree. But what do we do with external reality? We don't image them like a camera obscura does. We transform reality into a neural modal reality. We don't know how 'close' our neuronal reality is to the outside world and will never know, because we can only think with neurons. So we can't make a comparison. In addition, our brain constructs our reality, so it turns stimuli into a holistic spatio-temporal scenario. It creates this theater of consciousness, which we believe is identical to reality and, above all, that we can - transcendently - recognize it.
What an illusion!

You're absolutely right, determinism depends on perspective. Everything is deterministic from the perspective of the Big Bang. The further I zoom in, the more indeterministic my perspective becomes. From the point of view of the single individual, the world is indeterministic, even more so from the perspective of a photon.

Regarding free will: firstly, it is relative and secondly, everything that has to do with life starts at the molecular level, not at the quantum mechanical level. And cause life is a concept of structure, meaning that life can only be understood as a structure, free will can also only be understood from the point of view of structure theory.
Your approach is interesting nonetheless, but you have to transform it into the world of structures. Then you can see that the macro determines the micro.

It is an epistemological question how to describe something. Of course, psychology describes consciousness from a very different angle than biology does. So when we have a psychological question about consciousness, we consult psychology. But we wouldn't think of asking biology how psychology should work.

Imagine a tree. A painter will describe its form and color, a physicist its atomic structure, a biologist its biostructure, etc.pp.
It's always the same tree. It is only described from different perspectives and with different categorical means.
Just apply that to the mind-body problem and you'll see that it's really a bogus problem.
We are all biological beings - right? Then we must also be biologically describable. If we want to describe consciousness biologically, we should use a biologically usable term for it, e.g. nervous excitability in the sense of an orientation performance or some other terms.
Information is not a biological term, nor is mental.
When information is used in the context of biology, it is more in everyday language to represent complex relationships, but it is not a biological analytical term.
So don't keep mixing biology with psychology/philosophy.

No, nothing goes beyond biology. It's just the descriptive level. Imagine someone threatens me with a gun, I see that and run away.
Described biologically, this means: a stimulus hits my eye, is sent to the brain, associates patterns there, and there is an afferent stimulus that generates a movement.
Described psychologically, this means that I become aware of a danger, my brain activates an escape reflex and releases hormones.
Both times I consciously experience a situation and describe it with different sign systems.
In biology, the psychological/philosophical concept of consciousness means - I'll call it - neuronal excitement or orientation etc., whatever, it's exactly the same.
Nobody would think of seeing the biological description as causal for the psychological description.
But that is exactly what makes the mind-body problem.

Imagine a stimulus hitting the eye and being passed on to the brain. There it is associated with patterns and triggers an afferent stimulus that leads to movement of the extremities.
Exactly this process, which is described here biologically (I know, very simplified), can also be described psychologically or otherwise, namely: I see something, think about it and run away.
Both are exactly the same, only in a different language and through a different perspective.
Would you now come up with the idea of wanting to derive the second description from the first or wanting to see a causality between the two? Of course not. But that is exactly what one does when one asks how thoughts arise from neurons, or more generally: how does mind arise from matter.

how did you get the idea that I wanted to separate the brain and the mental? Exactly the opposite is the case. I've said it umpteen times here, there are different perspectives with different categories from different sciences. Who mixes that, has the mind-bodyl problem. It's that simple. I'll say goodbye at this point, thank you very much.

Yes, neurons generate mental content. But that is nothing more than everyday understanding. If you want to argue with scientific precision, you have to separate the neuronal, i.e. physiological, level from the philosophical or psychological. As I said, we must not say that apples make pears. If you want to explain something mental, you have to derive it ontologically and only then translate it into the language of psychology.
The whole mind-body problem arose from this hasty category mistake. In the case of the ancient Greeks, this is still understandable, because there was no division into different sciences with their respective conceptual apparatus.
Today, however, it is obvious, but continues to be mixed up, unfortunately also in academia.