Can't ID be tested AT ALL?

Yeah, you said that already.I gave you the reasons why I disagreed. I don't find consciousness all that mysterious. Like most of the questions of philosophy, whether or not we're "zombies" is completely irrelevant, since "zombie" is not defined in any detectable sense. You seem to think that it's settles among philosophers that we aren't zombies; that doesn't seem to be the case.At any rate, philosophy is essentially irrelevant to this discussion. Philosophy as a field largely exists to undermine knowledge, not increase it. They held back cognitive research for centuries, simply as a result of their assertions that it was impossible to study cognition. Good thing they turned out to be wrong. (They're pretty much wrong about everything that isn't obvious.) I still don't understand what you're talking about. And having "experience of our perceptions" doesn't seem to be something that most people spend a lot of time, having. I would venture to say that the majority of the average human's waking time is spend doing nothing but behavioral responses. But that's exactly what it seems to be. The evidence for this is that our conscious awareness does not extend beyond the physical world, and is completely dependent on a convergence of required physical criteria. I'm not impressed with the level of argumentation produced in the Nagels paper. For instance:

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Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it.

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Wait, what? Is this how it works in philosophy? First you make a sweeping, universal statement, and then you admit that you don't have any evidence to support it?Well, then why should we take Nagels seriously when he says consciousness is so widespread, since he admits in the very same sentence that he has no evidence that consciousness even exists? Or any metric for detecting it?He's just making stuff up. Why is that something worth taking seriously? No way, or no way yet? And doesn't the progress made in the past hundred years in terms of doing exactly that constitute evidence that it isn't impossible? Just because people hold wrong ideas doesn't mean that their ideas are wrong. Just because something is debated doesn't mean one side isn't right. You seem to have a pretty low bar for what constitutes evidence. Is that common in philosophy? The necessary/sufficient dichotomy is not one that I find meaningful.

If it can be studied naturally, then how could it have a non-natural explanation? Your argument isn't coherent. And I don't know if you've heard, but philosophy of science isn't exactly a science. And just because simple explanations generally leave little room for whatever woowoo you're interested in, doesn't mean that "reductionism" - that is, a snarky name for finding out how things work - represents something that undermines our arguments.If you think that philosophers have the influence to cause scientific techniques to simply fall out of "vogue", just because they say they should, you're drastically overestimating the influence of philosophy in science. I work intimately with scientists in a few different fields, and let me assure you - philosophical concerns couldn't possibly be any more remote from the day-to-day prosecution of science. Most scientists have never even heard of people like Popper. What reasons? Used as a syononym for "that which isn't explainable in natural terms", it's actually up to you to tell us what "supernatural" is supposed to mean, since you're the one who brought the concept into the discussion. He hasn't said that. I've come the closest to saying that, but obviously I can't see the future. I can only make guesses based on what we know now, and I think I've been making a good case (that you've been ignoring) that the explanation for consciousness will be physical, because we've made progress in that direction. There may be. I don't see any reason why there couldn't be. There don't seem to be any, though. None that have ever stood up to any kind of scrutiny.

That seems obvious. But neither one of us can predict the future, and since there's no way to know what explanations can't be reached, it seems fruitless to proceed from the assumption that something can't ever be explained. What's the merit of that assumption? That's fine, I guess. I find your enthusiasm for it ridiculous. But let me assure you - if you think my disdain is based on a lack of familiarity with philosophy, or ignorance of it, you're mistaken. Sure, they're ignorant about philosophy. That was the point, didn't you understand that? Knowledge of philosophy is as irrelevant to the prosecution of science as knowledge of last night's American Idol winner, the self-important delusions of so-called "philosophers of science" notwithstanding. Who said anything about him being the most contemporary philosopher of science?I think you'll find you have more success if you actually address my arguments, not strawmen. I would say that heat is the most obvious emergent phenomena, easily reduced to fundamental physics.And chaos? You like to toss out accusations of ignorance but you seem to betray your own. The entire premise of chaos is that great apparent complexity can emerge from very simple rules.Reductionism, as you self-importantly dub it, has made great strides in understanding the natural forces in play around us and harnessing them to human use. Wholism and wholistic thinking have produced no knowledge whatsoever. And how could they? How could you even begin to understand something by refusing to examine it in detail? I already did. Are you changing your assertions? Percy doesn't speak for me, so Percy's impression of my words are irrelevant. "Utterly resistant?" You've already said we've made "movement on that front." (Your exact words.) Which is it? You don't seem to know, which I guess is why you're arguing out of both sides of your mouth. Nonsense. That consciousness arises from the brain is trivially demonstrated. I don't reccommend that you do, but one trivial proof would be for you to surgically remove your brain and see what happens to your consciousness. Sigh. Look, name-calling doesn't constitute an argument, and the fact that I disagree with you about something isn't sufficient reason for me to conclude that I'm some kind of idiot. But I'm beginning to understand that name-calling and derision is the best that so-called "philosophy" has to bring to the table.

Just now:

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The point you seem to have trouble understanding is that we may be incapable of providing an explanation at all.

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You're clearly putting forth that assumption as reasonable. I see it as meritless. Again, these are the exact comments you made before dinner on this very day:

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Reductionism is in high disrepute, if you haven't heard, from scientists and philosophers of science alike (and I'm not talking about anti-science folks and IDers here).

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Clearly you think philosophy is of such crucial importance to science that you feel that the disdain of a philosopher is sufficient to disqualify a methodology from science.Look, I'm not having any trouble at all here understanding your statements. Why are you having such difficulty all of a sudden remembering them? It's going to be hard to continue debate with you if you have no memory of what's come before. It's like I'm arguing with the main character from Memento. It's obvious to me that you've done nothing of the sort. Pretty much all you've done is level accusations of ignorance. And I'm still waiting for you to address the original question. Ah, yes. Of course, in philosophy, there's no requirement to be consistent in one's terminology; definitions can be redacted and altered at a moment's notice to suit the argument of the minute.Single-handedly, you're proving the irrelevance of philosophy. Congratulations, I guess. But if they're emergent, that's exactly what it means - that they can be reduced to their component interactions.Sure, it may not be easy to do so, and our understanding as a result may bear little resemblance to the casual understanding of the whole - much as the kinetic motion of atoms seems far removed from our experience of heat and temperature.So what? The idea that reductionism can be hard doesn't strike me as a mark against it - not when the alternative is simplistic, woolly thinking. Well, great. When we hit the limits, we'll let you know. So far, though, we've pretty handily walked right past every other "limit" on reductionism that has ever been proposed. And if the limit is the limit of what can coherently be described in language - as the idea of the "supernatural", which appears to be undefinable, would suggest - I'm not too worried we're likely to hit it soon. I didn't say that you did. I simply used "supernatural" to refer to a concept that you introduced, as did Percy.I'm sorry if you don't like it as a synonym, but that's what it is - a synonym for the very concepts you've been introducing. That is, phenomenon that could be studied naturally but isn't natural. We're certainly not the ones who brought that malarkey up, surely you agree? And as I originally contended, and you have not been able to refute - the neurological correlates are the explanation, and the explanation will increase in sufficiency as our understanding of the neurology increases. It does arise from the key, because the car is designed to require the key as a proximate cause. It also arises from the transmission, from the engine, from the gas, and from all the other parts that, when they are absent, leave the car motionless.What it most definitely doesn't arise from is any kind of supernatural car-soul, or any other "naturally-studied phenomenon that isn't natural." And the same techniques that allow us to conclude that about cars allow us to conclude that about people. I've burned other things besides wood, I guess. These examples don't bear any analogous relationship to actual scientific thought processes. I hardly find your vocational qualifications relevant. Since you're advancing the claims of philosophy, and using the work of philosophy to buttress your claims, for all intents and purposes you're a philosopher, because you're engaged in philosophy.If you're so concerned about my opinion of you, though, you could do much to redeem it by actually addressing my arguments.

Can science study the atom, or only the objectively accessible aspects of it?

Again, I never said "must."Just, if I had to guess, I'd confidently guess "yes." Because the alternative guess is useless. The assumption you're not sure if you hold or not is meritless. To the contrary; I see that meaning very clearly in your statement. Clearly, though, that's nonsense. Scientists would be most qualified to capture what distinguishes their fields, since they're right there doing work in their field. So you say. I'm satisfied to leave others to make their own determination about that. I think it's pretty obvious that you've been trying to have things both ways in several posts now. The one that started this whole business. You replied to the message earlier today.More memory issues? Then why bring them up? If I stated somewhere that all scientific questions have been answered, then I have to ask you to provide a quote.Regardless, though, we've made progress in those fields, which would seem to suggest that these aren't intractable issues beyond the limits of science. Just, hard problems. I think it won't, but neither one of us can predict the future; moreover, I find your pessimism ultimately fruitless. What's to be gained by giving up? Patterns of neural connections exchanging neurotransmitters in response to activation thresholds.That didn't seem so hard. Do we have one? You keep using that term but I don't know what it refers to. And I don't see how it represents an intractable problem for science. Just because you put that word "subjective" in there? I can't do that, so the key is necessary for me. What is necessary is some way to close the ignition switch. Either by turning the key or by shorting across the switch.Brains are clearly necessary. I've seen no evidence that they're not sufficient. Probably a computer, though, could take the place of the brain, but some kind of hardware is necessary, and probably sufficient. (This is where your necessary/sufficient dichotomy seems completely useless - multiple different equivalent things, only one of which is necessary. Are the rest not necessary? Are they all not necessary, since as long as one is left, you can take away as many as you like? Or are they equally co-necessary?) What would be the difference, exactly? I would suggest that the majority of humans are unconscious robots, most of the time.That's not cynicism. The majority of the human experience is spent in instinctive behavior, responding passively, not in a state of conscious self-reflection. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of "subjective" consciousness or whatever to explain. Nonsense, since science is regularly done without this "necessary/sufficient" ridiculousness. It's a useless concept as far as I can tell that has nothing to do with function in the real world.

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From what evidence do you conclude that your intelligence is not the product of natural causes?

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That's what I want to know. You've repeated your conclusion - consciousness is not, in your view, the result of purely natural causes - almost to distraction, but I keep getting stymied when I ask for the reasoning.To conclude from a lack of physical explanation is to make an appeal to ignorance; moreover, it isn't even accurate since we have partial explanations for how consciousness arises in the brain. To conclude from the assumption that consciousness is beyond the limits of science is, again, making an appeal to ignorance. And we know of no properties of mind that can't ever be investigated the same way. There may or may not be properties we don't know how to investigate yet. You think, apparently, that subjectivity is a part of that, but I don't follow that reasoning (and can't, since you won't lay it out for me.) As it turned out, everybody who wasn't motivated by playing politics was pretty much able to discern her lack of consciousness accurately. And, in the end, the realization that she literally had no cerebrum allowed for a completely reliable diagnosis.But I find it rather amusing that consciousness, to you, is at once so simple and obvious that it need not be defined nor any rigorous method necessary to conclude that it's all over the place; yet simultaneously so complicated that any explanation is inherently impossible.I don't know, consciousness doesn't seem all that amazing or special to me. The question to me is not why people are conscious; the much more interesting question is - if people are supposedly conscious, why are they so generally stupid?

If there can be no success in scientific understanding of consciousness, as you seem to think, or guess, or whatever - what's the point of studying it? If that floats your boat. It's a perfectly acceptable explanation, if one completely lacking in any interesting details. But you have to start somewhere, right? It's just different patterns of neural activity. Frequency is different than amplitude, so it only stands to reason that, since we have the organs to detect frequency, the brain must have some way of perceiving that information. I don't care whose it is, and an argument from anonymous authority doesn't go very far with me. It's a useless construct, as I've amply demonstrated - it can't seem to handle simple situations where one of several equivalent things is necessary. Keys and swiss-army knives. Any and all. A hammer is necessary to pound a nail, but you can do it with a screwdriver, too. Does that mean that nails pound themselves? No, of course not. One of several different things is still "necessary", but this construct doesn't support such reasoning - as evidenced by these comments of yours:

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To illustrate, I pointed out that although if you took the key out of the ignition of a car it would stop, this did not mean that the key was a necessary component of car motion - and of course I'm right, cars are perfectly capable of moving without an ignition key.

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Of course brains are necessary for consciousness in human beings, yes, but we do not know if they are necessary for consciousness in general, because we do not know what causes consciousness. Gasoline is necessary for motion in gasoline-powered cars, but it is not necessary for motion in electric cars.

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Necessary/sufficient doesn't generate knowledge; it's simply a blind for you to exploit language ambiguity to score points in debate. It's clearly ludicrous. Fallacious argument ad populum. Your own sources came right out and said that we have no means by which to detect consciousness, so how could "most people" actually know anything about it? Their testimony is meaningless. Come the fuck on! You've been taking that position the entire debate, and you certainly began by substituting yourself into the place of someone who was doing exactly that.Well, fair enough. I guess you think you can argue for someone's side without advancing their position. Whatever. If you didn't mean to take that position, I'll accept it as just another of our failures to communicate. Who knows? We can't even detect consciousness. I don't think humans are all that conscious, so obviously I don't expect anybody else to be all that conscious, either. That's completely false. I gave you the answer, but you felt it was simplistic.Well, I'm not a neurologist. I'm just a guy. It's the best explanation I know, and it seems more than sufficient for my purposes. It's more than sufficient for me to conclude that consciousness isn't magic but mundane. I'm not really angry. Just frustrated at a debate opponent who won't address simple questions, demands the use of debate constructs that allow him to misrepresent my views, and shifts positions constantly.

Oh, dear lord. "Scientism" - the last, gasping defense of those who can't stand science crowding out their cherished woowoo.