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

In creatures with advanced minds, that have vast amounts of memories and ideas vying for attention

Whose attention are these memories and ideas vying for?

So the conscious is real, yes, just like a swim class or a reunion is real

Also I don't understand this. Could you explain what you mean by "real", and how this real-ness is shared by swim classes, reunions, and consciousness?

Please: go ahead and dominate the discussion. I don't have anything like your stamina for this sort of thing, and am quite happy to be left behind in the dust.

Ah for myself I think asking questions is best at this stage. I don't want to write lots of paragraphs about the "non-physical" or "Physicalism" if these terms don't have any agreed upon meaning.

Nah: if a nail is conscious, it's not because of its physicality (Sci's point), it's because of the mind embodied in it (on mind-body dualism) or because it was never really physical in the first place, but rather consciousness presenting the appearance of physicality (on idealism).

I'm beginning to realize that *if* anyone in the proponent camp wanted to try and make these arguments publicly accessible a lot of philosophical usage of words will need to be dropped.

Libertarian, Idealist, Intentional, Materialist....there's more.

Why I think it's better to just accept, for the sake of argument at the very least, that nails are not conscious. Why it should be obvious they aren't is the interesting question...

Whose attention are these memories and ideas vying for?

Neurons are vying to be in control of the output of the brain including the consciousness it creates. There is no central part of the brain that is in control of what the brain decides.

Also I don't understand this. Could you explain what you mean by "real", and how this real-ness is shared by swim classes, reunions, and consciousness?

Swim classes, reunions and consciousness all really exist even though none is an actual object.

'Non-physical' is used as a term because Physicalists, a metaphysical position, hold that what is "phys
ical" in its base constituents has no-mental character & no teleology, and (for many Physicalists) whose complete description can be given in the mathematical terms of current physics.

So we should just not use the word "physical"? Is that the takeaway?

You keep on quoting an extensive quote that says the word "physical" has different meanings to different people (e.g. https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-i...6#pid52556) . Since different people mean different things when they use this word, and since this word is key to your argument, I think you should tell us what you mean when you use the word.

The definition of faith; the antithesis of the scientific endeavor.

Certainly you can see how easy it is to imagine a similar sentiment being uttered in support of prevailing 'sciences' of days past?  I'm sure Copernicus had plenty of otherwise intelligent folks telling him his heliocentric theory was 'woo' since it wasn't 'consistent with Ptolemic science'.

You seem to have missed the part of that sentence where I said, "knowing that science is steadily advancing, hopefully getting closer to that ideal, complete physics." I was in no sense suggesting that scientists before Copernicus should have ignored Copernicus, or that scientists today should ignore new discoveries.

You keep on quoting an extensive quote that says the word "physical" has different meanings to different people (e.g. https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-i...6#pid52556) . Since different people mean different things when they use this word, and since this word is key to your argument, I think you should tell us what you mean when you use the word.

Oh the word isn't a key, it's more a sort of shorthand that makes sense in the context of how it's used in specific philosophical arguments.

I'm fine with not using it, now that we agree - for the sake of argument at least - that atoms have no consciousness and make up both nails and brains.

I summarised it as follows:

If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then we do not (because we cannot) know we are conscious.
We know we are conscious.
Therefore, consciousness is not epiphenomenal.

I don't think consciousness is simply a phenomenon. It is a key part of the life of intelligent creatures. Without it, the neurons would not have a unified purpose. But consciousness, as I see it, is a construct of the brain that builds the highlights of all our mental activities, and builds the model such that the self is in charge of all this. That constructed self feeds back into the rest of the brain as a conscious self, and influences future decisions, which then become part of the modeled self. Thus, the consciousness is aware of its own reported consciousness.

[Laird]

I don't think consciousness is simply a phenomenon. It is a key part of the life of intelligent creatures. Without it, the neurons would not have a unified purpose. But consciousness, as I see it, is a construct of the brain that builds the highlights of all our mental activities, and builds the model such that the self is in charge of all this. That constructed self feeds back into the rest of the brain as a conscious self, and influences future decisions, which then become part of the modeled self. Thus, the consciousness is aware of its own reported consciousness.

From that, it seems that you're an interactionist of some sort (presumably, some sort of "emergentist" interactionist), and that you thus reject the causal closure of the physical.

(I know that "physical" is a fraught word in this conversation, but, operationally, what I mean by "rejecting the causal closure of the physical" is that you allow that the brain does not merely follow the laws of physics, but is also affected by consciousness).

It's either that, or you're confused, don't actually have a coherent position, and have made an ad hoc claim in an attempt to evade the argument - which in my eyes has a high probability of being the case.

From that, it seems that you're an interactionist of some sort (presumably, some sort of "emergentist" interactionist), and that you thus reject the causal closure of the physical.

(I know that "physical" is a fraught word in this conversation, but, operationally, what I mean by "rejecting the causal closure of the physical" is that you allow that the brain does not merely follow the laws of physics, but is also affected by consciousness).

It's either that, or you're confused, don't actually have a coherent position, and have made an ad hoc claim in an attempt to evade the argument - which in my eyes has a high probability of being the case.

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.

At its base, I think thoughts are patterns of firings of neurons. At the lowest level, signals from senses like the eye and the sense of balance in the ear send signals to the brain. The brain organizes these signals into models, which are patterns of neuron firings based on these inputs from the senses. The brain compares these with previously saved models of these inputs. The brain can then identify what it sees based on what it had seen previously. It can also link these visual models to models of words that it hears and speaks, thus tying in words to match images. Thus, a person can see a tennis ball coming toward his racquet and think "that's the ball".

These patterns of neuron firings associated with the sensing of the position of the ball and tennis racquet link to patterns of neuron firings that control motions. If one is playing tennis, for instance, and upper levels of the mind have decided to hit the ball, then the brain looks at these models of the ball's and racquet's positions and movements, and builds a model of the future movement of the arm and racquet needed to cleanly hit that ball. Deciding to execute on this plan, the brain's neural models direct other neurons which have models on how to move arm and body muscles such that they cause the racquet to hit the ball.

Hitting that tennis ball cleanly and making it go where you want it to go is a very complex task. But if you have done it many times, your brain has saved models of what it means to hit a ball cleanly and calls on these models from its memory. Combining the inputs from the senses and its model of good strokes, the brain calculates the unique muscle movements needed to perform the stroke in this new situation. As the arm starts to move, there is constant feedback on the position of the racquet and ball, all of which are fed back into the models to make corrections to the stroke as needed. This basically all happens outside of the realm of consciousness. If you are a skilled tennis player, you might consciously decide to lob the ball into the far right corner of the court, for instance, and the brain takes over from there.

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

I contend that the brain builds multiple neural models of what it means to play tennis. It builds neural models of the geometry of the court, how to run without falling, how gravity affects a ball, where your body is positioned with respect to the court, etc. Then it combines all these models into higher level models that define the rules, strategy, purpose, and ethics of the game. Putting it all together, you play tennis.

The brain also has similar models for cooking, working, reading, or living life, for instance. These neural models build on top of other neural models. Ultimately, these upper level models direct lower models of neurons that direct lower models all the way down to models that drive the muscles of the body.

In, my view, all this is done by neurons. On dualism, it gets a little murky, because somehow a "non-physical soul" entwines itself with this process at the executive level. 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. To me, dualism is an unneeded complication that does nothing to our understanding of the mental processes needed to play tennis or live life.

In my view, on top of all those models, we find another model, the model of the self, which I see as a neural model in the brain that puts all this together with an identity of "self". The brain refers to this model of the self when playing tennis, just like it refers to the models on how to run without losing one's balance, how to swing a racquet, and where strategically to hit the ball to win the point. The model of the conscious self puts it all together. The mind sees itself as not merely a robot chasing a ball, but as an entire human being controlled by a self that is directing the show with a clear overall purpose. 

That's what I think is happening. Obviously, nobody knows exactly what is going on. I think this view fits the available evidence far better than dualism.