Science will not replace religon because it has a hard time answering one very big question: "who am I?" Most religions say you are one soul in a world of many. Science currently has no good answer. You are consciousness created by the brain: how? If so then why? If consciousness is epiphenomenal and not a force of nature what is its evolutionary survival value?
Religion is based on superstitious faith but science also has faith that these questions will be eventually answered without a major shift in its current paradigms.

Sensations are nervous system-dependent. — 180 Proof

I agree that the sensations that we experience are nervous system-dependent. But the question is how. Are you elimitative and believe the actual sense-data "red" is nothing but the nerve signal? If not then how does the nervous system create such sensible qualities. There are some theories but I dont think science has gotten very far in discovering such NCC.
Most believe that colors never existed until brains created them for the first time ever. Maybe its right but I question it: the idea being that behind the yet to be discovered NCC are deeper psycho-physical laws that may not be nervous system dependent.

I think consciousness requires a self and we have point of view in front of which we experience things. It almost invokes a homunculus in the middle of the brain watching a screen with images on it or some central location where we can have a unified coherent perception or thought. — Andrew4Handel

Then the self is not the experiences but the capacity to have experiences and persists longer than the experiences themselves and the experiences are seperate and made from sensations created in the brain.

For example, "Could have done otherwise" or "The ability to make choices not constrained by determinism or randomness". — Cidat

A good definition is self-determination. That is you have a personality, a character, desires that are part of who you are and are not completly determined by external forces such as neurons.
In other words you are (to at least a small degree) an actual independent force of nature.

You are describing indirect realism. There is a complex chain of events leading to colors being created in the brain. I accept this. But this last step is a complete mystery. How did the brain create the sense quality that we experience as blue. I assume it was not invented from scratch. I assume it employed psychophysical bridging laws which may have existed before brains even evolved. Maybe the real external sky doesnt look like the sky in our visual field but that doesnt necessarily mean it has no color. Galileo overreached in saying colors are in the soul. They merely play no causal role in dyamics. A blue stone and brown stone fall at the same rate. That doesnt mean that they are devoid of color.

sorry...yes

I am also a panpsychist but to say that everything has mentality is to say nothing. Where do you draw the line? A rock is an arbitrary collection of atoms. you can say the left side of the rock is sentient and the right is also? what set of atoms is the rock? the rock would have an infinite number of minds. But the world is already divided into "natural individuals" that appear to be self movers. elementary particles fit the bill as do eukaryotic cells and animals with nervous systems.

I do think that awareness and the material world we are aware of are two seperate things. it is common sense to think we are not looking at ourselves but looking at the world. Matter is directly knowable because it has the ability to create sense-data even if that sense-data is in our brain. The alternative is the compunding of mysteries - the mystery of a unified causally efficatious mind or soul with the mystery of the different sensible qualities and their production.

It would make sense that the brain evolved to make us believe we are directly interacting with the world even if it is really a virtual world. We feel an itch in our left arm and scratch it. We dont scratch an image in our brain. For all intents and puposes we act "as if" interacting directly with objects in the world even when we believe it is only indirectly that we perceive and interact with things. In the phantom limb illusion an amputee thinks he has an itch or pain in his arm even though the arm is gone. We can say his feeling is in a virtual body image / schema. But perhaps in active imagination / thinking we are directly interacting not with the outside world but with the virtual models in our brain.

Neuro-science today cannot explain how consciousness is created - the hard problem is not just one problem but can be broken into three. 1- how are qualities like the color red created, 2 - how are qualities from different modalities like a visual field and feelings and sounds bound together to be experienced simultaneously, 3 - assuming such consciousness is created how is it causally efficacious so that it adds something beyond mere automation. Any enhancement to the current physicalist worldview to explain these things would be paradigm shifting - much more so then even quantum physics.

Some people I know think religion is so stupid - how could people believe such silly superstition. My answer is this. Science tells us how lasers and computers work and can put a man on the moon but is silent on the most important question - who and what am I. In a world of interacting particles I do not exist. At least religion says something. Perhaps I am a soul and some God may guide my journey beyond the body.

So there two incompatible worldviews - science and religion. Philosophy perhaps can bridge that gap and point the way to a single coherent worldview by naturalizing the mind. Panpsychism is an attempt to do so - there are little souls everywhere even in electrons. Rocks may not be sentient, but particles that have self-movement and agency and seem to interact with their peers to create crystaline rocks may. And single celled eukaryotic creatures like amoebas may have mentality and animal cells may interact with their peers to create bodies and brains.

unless you believe rocks have feelings — jgill

not rocks...but maybe amoebas do...with no nervous system

Sensations are what I directly, immediately experience.
Mind and matter are ideas which make my sensations coherent. — Art48

yes .. sense data is the foundation of all theory. Matter and mind are such theory. But somewhere in your theory there must also be a place for sense-data itself. When did this foundation of everthing we know first appear in the universe? How does it relate to the other theories in a coherent whole. In my theory it is a product of matter which minds can then become aware of.

What on Earth would a "mindless sensation" be? — RogueAI

a mindless sensation is a blue sky before anybody sees it and a thunder clap with nobody around to hear it.

the common sense view is that mind can experience things outside the mind in the world - the blue sky, the green leaves, the singing birds.

you have proven nothing. some people think that even individual living cells may have some form of sentience in which case a nervous system is not even necessary. But even if a nervous system is necessary does that mean insects or clams are sentient?

A different perspective is that sensations are ontologically primary and fundamental. Mind is the idea of that which experiences sensations. Matter is an idea we use to make sense of sensations — Art48

Are you saying that matter and mind are merely useful fictions and dont really exist? I would agree that sensations are epistemologically primary - all of our knowledge is based on them. But then we can theorize that matter and mind are real in that matter lies behind and helps make sense of sensations and mind is real in its capacity to experience them. Hume and then James in his radical empericism attempts to eliminate mind as a thing in itself and view it as merely a sequence of experiences. But to me it is more common sense to see mind as something distinct - a capacity to experience. In panpsychism matter and mind end up being the same thing which includes a capacity to experience. Other minds cannot be directly perceived but are inferred as the hidden cause behind teleological activities.

you are stating current dogma, but in both cases mine and yours there are no currently known laws through which the sensation red or pain springs into existence. Your view is of a hypothetical ncc (neural correlates of consciousness), mine a hypothetical universal correlates of qualia. So in both cases science is incomplete and something new is needed. But in your case biological evolution generated something radically new. My view is more consistent with what we mean by physical law in that it existed earlier in the evolution of the world and highly complex things like billions of neural signals dont generate simple elementaries like a patch of red. My view, a kind of panqualityism has the same motivation and is consistent with panpsychism in its attempt to avoid a miraculous radical emergence of the mental from the physical under the most recent highly complex circumstances.
Evolution employed existing laws, didnt create new ones. Animal evolution is limited to existing rules and can't for instance invent gravity because it would be beneficial to not fly off the planet.

What is concsciousness like from a view from nowhere? — Harry Hindu

Nagel pointed out that the view from within is always from somewhere, from the here and now. Somehow this is a fact, a piece of direct observation, but it is not an objective fact. I am here in this location and you are there. Biden is in England and I am in New York. If our minds just switched locations there would be no objective difference and yet there would be a difference to me. I would see things from Biden's location and be surrounded by world leaders. So even in a metaphysics that contains "points of view" as fundamental entities there would still be something missing. The subjective fact that I am one of those point of view.

is there a view from nowhere? I dont see how there can be. The idea of objectivity may be closer to a view from everywhere.

In panpsychism an electron is a little mind as seen from the inside and matter as seen from the outside.

The problem is how the brain, a public object creates a private mental world - the conscious Subject. That private mental world is only observable to one self. Any theory that describes how a mental world of the self can pop into existence from neural electrical signals (the hard problem) must fail because it can have no practical consequences. If you cant directly observe something (the mind) and it has no effects (being epiphenomenal) it produces no testable consequences. So no theory will ever work.

Dualism at least says there is an independent entity: a mind that lives inside the brain that can make a difference because it can have an independent effect on brain activity rather than being only an effect of brain activity. Dualism also explains the intuition there is a diachronic self - something more permanent that endures through sleep, anesthesia, aging and yet seems in some way to be the same old me. We know the brain creates much of the content of consciousness and we can have no viable perceptions or memories without it but that may just be a virtual reality presentation created for the benefit of an independent observer within the brain.

Perhaps matter has a mental aspect that enables it to tune on information. Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics saw the guiding wave as information that helps particles adjust their movements as part of a whole..and this seems quite mental. As mental beings we are also guided by information. The information of being an American, a Human, a Man, our own selves with their own personality over time is information and seems to guide us.

But information is just one aspect of mentality which happens over time. The other aspect is in the present for every conscious being right now has a unique location and private subjective perspective on the sights and sounds of the world from that place.

It comes down to a theory of "other minds". Experiments have shown that even some animals may have such theories. We know we are conscious and live in a private little mental world and we attribute such invisible inner worlds to other people but then where do we draw the boundary. Descartes thought that dogs are not conscious. Are fish or insects conscious? I am a panpsychist and believe that conscious entities are ubiquitous and may exist in single celled eukaryotes.

The problem is we cant directly perceive other minds and can only infer their existence., WE can take a stingy view and say that only things like me are conscious but this seems to go against the whole flow of western science which says "nothing can come from nothing". In other words a more scientific view is that conscious evolved from consciousness and didn't just emerge from nothing. The hallmark of conscious beings is that they are active self movers. Even electrons in today's physics are no longer dead pieces of rock but active agents that seem to make unpredictable quantum jumps. Other minds exist in nature - are they natural in the universe or oddities that emerged out of nothing with no effect on anything? For some speculations see: scientific animism and Panpsychism and Real Mental Causation

In your estimation, would the product of one’s work be publicly owned? Or do these become public property after a certain time? — NOS4A2

In a left-libertarian type scheme once you have paid society for extraction or use of a natural resource then the added value of mixing in your labor to create a greater value is forever yours. The Georgist idea is for society to charge a rent on the value of raw land (a land value tax) , but the improvements made to the land (a house,etc) are not taxed since the land was not your creation but the improvements were.

ownership is certainly a legal principle that gives limited control over specific objects to specific individuals. But this does not necessarily mean ownership rights are or should be purely arbitrary and pragmatic. Don't we as individuals have real rights that precede the whim of autocrats or tyranny of the majority? John Locke and the founding fathers believed there are natural rights that are deeper and from which legitimate laws derive.

To me it all starts with the libertarian presumption that you have the right to own your own body and nobody else's. But the flip side on libertarianism is that you don't have the natural right to own anything beyond your body. Everything else can be derived from that. For instance Henry George believed natural resources should be publicly owned and Silvio Gesell thought the same for fiat money.

see the natural rights of ownership

I would say you don't really own your actions but you own your body and can therefore do whatever action you want with it as long as you don't impede someone else's ownership of their own body (slavery). This implies a mind-body dualism which although is not a fashionable scientific position, is a common sense view. This is the basis of libertarianism. Its corollary is everything that is not your body like natural resources, stock certificates and money are not necessarily things you have a right to own and this leads to left-libertarianism.

see http://natrights.blogspot.com/

This is intuitively plausible but could do with more elaboration and argument, if you have time. Can you explain further what you mean? — bert1

What i am saying is roughly the same as Michael Lockwood's disclosure view in which Awareness can be thought of as "a kind of a searchlight, sweeping around an inner landscape in the brain" . The brain can then create the various sensations but there is a self that ties them into a single unified being. The nerve signals are ephemeral and correspond to the ephemeral generation of experiences. But the self observing those experiences has more continuity and derives from the underlying consciousness of a conscious nerve cell from which its consciousness splits off to become the dominant consciousness in the brain. It is an interactive dualism, but one grounded in a natural panpsychist world where there is a flow of mentality in every living eukaryotic cell and all the way down. Why else would the brain spend so much energy creating a virtual world of colors and sounds and feelings if not for the benefit of an independent entity that has powers of its own? see https://philpapers.org/rec/SLEPAR

I think there is not just one "hard problem" but four.
1. the one Chalmers concentrates on..how does physical activity generate sensations or qualia. Maybe this one is not that hard. It is clear that certain physical vibrations or energy deterministically generates sounds and colors. I would assume something like this also happens in the brain.
2. This may be the most "hard problem". How are the different sense modalities bound together into a single conscious entity. I think that Chalmers and most philosophers make a critical error here by assuming that problem number one comes first and number two second so that qualia are first created and then bound together into a unity. I think number two comes first and has no dependence on number one. Conscious entities exist and are fundamental aspects of the universe. We can say that all animals (even single celled protozoa) are conscious and come with the inherent ability to sense qualia in there environment.
3. This and the next problem are ignored entirely by Chalmers. Conscious entities are efficacious. If they were not so we would not be having this discussion. Given the existence of quantum physics and probability waves I dont think this is such an impossible idea anymore.
4. What is called indexicality. Why I am I me and not you. Even if we concede that points of view or perspectives exist in the world, why am I this one particular point of view. Nagel pointed out that even in a world where everything is understood objectively this one very important fact would be missing.
see: https://philpapers.org/rec/SLETLO-2

It's so easy to see, that it is commonly known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
8 hours ago ReplyShare — tom

It is easy to see how an expanded physics or psychophysics can in theory correlate vibrations or patterns of energy with particular qualia such as colors and sounds and thereby for the brain to generate a virtual reality show.
The really hard problem is how the brain creates a private subjective world and for what reason if it is not efficacious. It is not only a hard problem it is probably an impossible problem if consciousness is not a product of the brain.

It is easy to see how the brain creates a virtual reality generating the qualia that we experience in consciousness. It is not so easy to see how an objective thing such as the brain can in theory even create a private subjective world of an observer.
We can imagine the brain mechanism for vision, hearing for instance shutting down so one can no longer see or hear and yet it would seem consciousness is not degraded one bit. It just has changed so those qualia are no longer part of it. Now if thoughts are removed and all reflection, communication, memory are erased I can still think that a person has phenomenal consciousness in totality. The person can still feel himself as a body breathing and alive. If feeling is totally erased and there is no qualia left at all to experience than perhaps consciousness ceases but as long as there is some qualia to experience there is still an observer to experience it.
While it is easy to see how a physical neuro-mechanism can generate the content of consciousness or qualia it is much harder to see how to see even in principle how it can generate a private subjective observer.

Terrapin
I am not sure what you mean by IDENTICAL. Is there some way in which the phenomenal qualities of colors, sounds, feelings and the private subjective worlds in which they appear are identical to the objective particles and their interactions ? Is it some new law that we havent discovered yet? Even if there was some bridging principle then wouldnt according to materialists, the physical causes be primary and the mental entirely dependent on it and therefore emerge out of it?