> Really your conscious experience is quite empty/vacuous.
I don't know about that. Maybe you need to elaborate more, but the fact that we are aware of our own consciousness and can practice introspection and speak of concepts like qualia suggests to me that consciousness is not completely empty/vacuous.
> Back to my early point about vision being grainy. The point there is that vision has artifacts of it's medium. It isn't some perfect magical substance that gives a continuous, smooth qualitative experience, rather it is grainy, and likely a physical configuration of neurons.
I fully agree with this statement. I'm well aware that our perception of reality is highly distorted/skewed and sensory information is heavily processed in the brain before it enters our sensory consciousness.
> ... it becomes pretty clearly it is entirely physical.
It's very plausible that the organization of neurons in the brain relates to our conscious experience. However, there are so many problems with the "physical" interpretation of consciousness. The entire brain is "physical" and very active yet only parts are conscious and others subconscious.
A fairly recent study challenges the idea of split brain consciousness, suggesting there may be something separate allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate despite being separated by a corpus callosotomy.
A very interesting case study, twins joined at the head, their physical brains strongly connected. They can control each other's limbs, "see through each other's eyes", and even know each other's thoughts. Yet despite that, each girl still has a mind of their own. Two separate consciousness, where is the physical barrier?
Saying consciousness is "entirely physical" is a rather meaningless statement when we don't even know what "physical" is. Nobody really knows what is the true objective nature of reality.
There was some interview where a smart dude basically said we became enamored with the scientific method and created these strict, quantitative laws/rules/measures. Now we are trying to squeeze reality into these derivations, which is backwards.
Are there fundamental phenomenon that undergird consciousness that we are entirely unaware of? Yeah probably.
I don't know about that. Maybe you need to elaborate more, but the fact that we are aware of our own consciousness and can practice introspection and speak of concepts like qualia suggests to me that consciousness is not completely empty/vacuous.
> Back to my early point about vision being grainy. The point there is that vision has artifacts of it's medium. It isn't some perfect magical substance that gives a continuous, smooth qualitative experience, rather it is grainy, and likely a physical configuration of neurons.
I fully agree with this statement. I'm well aware that our perception of reality is highly distorted/skewed and sensory information is heavily processed in the brain before it enters our sensory consciousness.
> ... it becomes pretty clearly it is entirely physical.
It's very plausible that the organization of neurons in the brain relates to our conscious experience. However, there are so many problems with the "physical" interpretation of consciousness. The entire brain is "physical" and very active yet only parts are conscious and others subconscious.
A fairly recent study challenges the idea of split brain consciousness, suggesting there may be something separate allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to communicate despite being separated by a corpus callosotomy.
https://neurosciencenews.com/split-brain-consciousness-6011/
A very interesting case study, twins joined at the head, their physical brains strongly connected. They can control each other's limbs, "see through each other's eyes", and even know each other's thoughts. Yet despite that, each girl still has a mind of their own. Two separate consciousness, where is the physical barrier?
https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/inseparable
> So the onus falls back onto you, what extra stuff is there?
Electromagnetism? Nuclear forces? Spacetime? Quantum entanglement? Superposition? Higgs field? Wave-particle duality? Dark matter? Dark energy?
One interpretation of particles (electrons, neutrons, photons, ...) is as excitations in a quantum field.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-a-particle-20201112/
Saying consciousness is "entirely physical" is a rather meaningless statement when we don't even know what "physical" is. Nobody really knows what is the true objective nature of reality.