If qualia is real, why does it have to be paranormal

Sorry about that, Steve. If you think consciousness is material and thoughts are material, maybe you could lay out the chemical and electrical composition of your thoughts with regard to your post above, including the formula for the feeling of exasperation which is clearly circulating around your synapses.

No Tim. It's up to folks that think as you to prove otherwise.

No Tim. It's up to folks that think as you to prove otherwise.

Yes, I know that, Steve, and that's because your materialist religion is so important (to you), you refuse to accept the blindingly obvious. That's why Parnia has to effectively nail jelly to the wall to shut you all up once and for all.

No Tim. It's up to folks that think as you to prove otherwise.

But we know we are conscious, and everything "material" is experienced through consciousness.

Even Sam Harris and Michael Shermer have retreated from the kind of physicalist position you espouse.

It's clear your adherence to physicalism is just a religious belief, given that you've never been able to defend it properly.

But we know we are conscious, and everything "material" is experienced through consciousness.

That's curious no? Based solely on our senses, we eventually learn language, learn the model of the world currently in vogue.   We have no means of knowing if anything is "real", if we are actually alone. But none the less, our consciousness we have.  We can also look for consistency.

My favorite analogy is Feynman's game of chess. We are watching a game of chess. Nobody told us the rules. Naturally, Dr F., like my grandfather was talking about Quantum Mechanics. Their experience was that all the "obvious" rules were wrong as one contemplated the very small or the very fast.

I think, the first question boils down to whether consciousness is produced by brain or whether it can exist without brain. How might you prove that?    We certainly can agree, doing things to brain or body affects our perception.    The only possible consciousness without brain, i can guess might be the NDE. Can we prove truly the dead person is both without brain and conscious? Or perhaps brain is here, consciousness travels astrally? How do we establish its truly not an illusion?   Is there another line of evidence?

whether consciousness is produced by brain

I don't see how this could be possible?

I don't see how this could be possible?

Well, you concede the brain is involved in thinking? We know senses input to the brain?

We know the brain controls the rest of the body.  

Where is your source of contradiction?

Well, you concede the brain is involved in thinking? We know senses input to the brain?

We know the brain controls the rest of the body.  

Where is your source of contradiction?

But none of that is proof of production.

What is the brain made of that would allow it to produce consciousness when other arrangements of matter do not?

But none of that is proof of production.

What is the brain made of that would allow it to produce consciousness when other arrangements of matter do not?

It's not proof of production but it certainly suggests my hypothesis as one real possibility.

If for example, there is some entity called a soul, that isn't material, how does it interact with the brain?   Your probable hypothesis must come with much uncertainty as well, no?   Do you in fact subscribe to some kind of a soul? If no, what do you feel is happening?

If my hypothesis is true, I'm stuck with a key issue. I don't know how to measure consciousness. If there is something special about neurons, if it's related to them being organic is someway, how cpuld I test whether something organic eas equally conscious?

It's not proof of production but it certainly suggests my hypothesis as one real possibility.

If for example, there is some entity called a soul, that isn't material, how does it interact with the brain?   Your probable hypothesis must come with much uncertainty as well, no?   Do you in fact subscribe to some kind of a soul? If no, what do you feel is happening?

If my hypothesis is true, I'm stuck with a key issue. I don't know how to measure consciousness. If there is something special about neurons, if it's related to them being organic is someway, how cpuld I test whether something organic eas equally conscious?

Even if there's no soul, there isn't any reason to think a brain, as an arrangement of non-conscious matter, produces consciousness.

Also a brain is another object in consciousness, though one with obviously interesting correlations. As the neuroscientist JR Smythies once said,

"How can the brain be in the head when the head is in the brain?"

To return to the phrase "why does it have to be paranormal", I'm taking that to mean, for present purposes, outside the understanding of present-day science.

As a young man, I was pretty much committed to the view of the world I took from the science and technology which I knew. When I first moved away from home to study at university, the first thing I realised was that I could no longer listen to the local radio stations from my home area. They transmitted on medium wave and fm, and over this modest distance of 60 miles or so, the signals could not be received. I was quite an expert in fiddling with radios, stringing up long aerial wires to receive distant am radio stations. That didn't help. When I returned home, the same problem, the radio signals from the big city, again on am and fm, neither could be received.

The only effective communication between these places (apart from physically travelling between the two) was a telephone, connected by physical wires the whole way, or be letter, dropped in a postbox and transported by road or rail.

When later I started to notice telepathic communications from people I'd grown to love,. appearing in my dreams, I realised the implications. This contact could not be by radio or any known means. Any magnetic or electrical signals from the brain might possibly be detected at a distance of a few inches from the head or by sensors attached to the skull, but there is no way on earth that anything would find its way across many miles when very powerful radio transmitters could not do so.

It isn't necessary to say 'paranormal' if that word stings. But something unknown to science was going on.

Later I'd find things breaking through conventional ideas about the flow of time too. Space and time were both being made irrelevant in some of my own direct experiences.

From that point on I had to tread carefully. If I was stepping into the unknown, I decided to be careful not just to swallow wholesale any old crackpot ideas I might come across. My science, physics and mathematics background gave me a firm grasp of logic, and I always tested ideas to see how much sense I could make of them.

But I think those initial experiences of space and time being broken gave me an understanding that perhaps we surround ourselves with a sphere, representing all of current knowledge, but there are cracks in that sphere and we can peep outside and without knowing what exactly, realise there is much more.