Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

[Laird]

I think the brain is affected by the consciousness, but the consciousness is just a model that the brain builds of its mental functioning. This model of the brain's mental functioning feeds back into the brain's mental processes. It is as though consciousness walks unto the stage and becomes an actor in the play in which consciousness is being created.

Again, your terminology is off: consciousness isn't a model; it is that within and by which models are constructed and comprehended.

Even if your terminology is accepted though, your response that, on your view, consciousness is causally efficacious - and thus that your view is not subject to the otherwise fatal argument (from the inability to know we're conscious) that Titus provided and which I summarised - fails: a model is not a cause in the relevant sense. Your view remains stuck with a causally impotent consciousness which cannot "touch itself" - yet we know that our consciousness can and does touch itself (know of its own existence).

Even on dualism, the basic mechanics of the control of a tennis stroke must be similar to what I just described.

Granted: it's at least roughly in the ballpark (groan), albeit that on dualism, some of that which you attribute merely to (physical) neurons is better attributed to the mind.

Where exactly the duties divide out between brain and soul, and how the signals get back and forth between the two are not clear at all.

Fair enough, except that what is clear is that strictly mental functions - phenomenally experiencing in particular - are carried out by the mind (or that which you refer to as "the soul").

To me, dualism is an unneeded complication that does nothing to our understanding of the mental processes needed to play tennis or live life.

And yet, either it or idealism (or some other non-physicalist account such as neutral monism) is necessary, so as to allow for consciousness to have the causal power that we know that it does have, and which isn't available on accounts such as yours.

I think this view fits the available evidence far better than dualism.

And yet plenty of evidence is regularly discussed on this board for which dualism is a much, much better fit, and which has at least in part been shared in this thread (near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences in general, shared-death experiences, telepathy, psychokinesis, etc etc). I don't remember you having responded to it in any meaningful way yet.

(Huh, Sci, it turns out that I have a bit more stamina for this than I expected. Don't let my contributions inhibit you from your own line of inquiry though).