Let me turn that question on its head and ask you why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter doesn't mean we default to assuming a materialistic approach is sufficient.
I can't get bogged down with arguing why it seems obvious to me that it isn't sufficient. As I wrote earlier, it still boggles my mind that people think otherwise.
> why should it be sufficient? Just because it interacts with matter...
Because causal closure is a feature of our physical theories that have immense explanatory and predictive power. This is good reason to think that anything that interacts with the physical is also physical or supervenes on the physical.
Given the lack of explanatory power physical theories have so far provided for consciousness, I think it is fair on that alone to be agnostic about the claim consciousness is purely explained by physical attributes.
I think that's fair. But in terms of where a potential investigator should focus their attention, i.e. attempt to develop a physicalist theory or explore other options, I think the totality of evidence points towards a physicalist theory being more likely.
FWIW, I believe your stance is the one that requires justification. After all, you seem to be positing (although it’s hard to tell, since you’re not committing to anything specific) that the default assumption about a phenomena we observe which takes place in a universe which otherwise follows the laws of physics, is that the phenomena is somehow not explainable using the laws of physics.
physics is incomplete. It was niels bohr who said, “Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.” without including psi and cogent six sigma data from consciousness studies it is not complete, nor can it pancomputationally bc of godel. not to mention exceptional human experiences like OOBE and cosmic consciousness. mass and energy make up 5% of the observable universe. to account for the rest with massless particles and dimensionless points and other made up stuff shows the inherent contradiction and metaphysical bias of materialistic monism philosophically. ironic that the big bang is something from -nothing- which makes no sense: there is no such thing as absolute nothingness and the first receptor had to be nonphysical. see vernon neppe and ed close on iqnexus, reality begins with consciousness on brainvoyage, and interviews on new thinking allowed. also see bernardo kastrups works for a computer scientists arguments for idealism in the context of many scientific experiments and the loss of local realism.
I was just reading through this sub thread and I agree. I immediately started comparing the statements against Russell's Teapot ("...can't get bogged down...") and God of the Gaps ("...lack of explanatory power physical theories...") type issues.
When I say can't get bogged down I mean I don't have the energy to get into a big long discussion.
You baited me into starting one... but I'll be brief. The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain. I could imagine myself as the same person except for the perception of two colors swapped. All this is summarized in the question, "What canvas does the brain's neurons draw its images on?" I can't imagine any answer that is material.
Also, saying that physical theories lack explanatory power is not the same thing as saying there is NOTHING can offer explanatory power, or even that physical theories cannot augment any theories. But I strongly oppose the blind optimism of those believing pure physical theories will explain consciousness when it is has so far failed abysmally. That is not the same thing as saying no such physical theories exist, but that I wish more people realized just how optimistic they sound without real reason to be.
Glad to have pulled you back in, however unwillingly. =) It's an interesting topic to kick around.
On the first, could we not say the same about how an image is rasterized from a set of points, to a polygon, to a shape, to a set of pixels displaying the images on your very screen? Before it was displayed, way down the stack, it was just a series of switches being turned off and on. Electrical impulses that viewed from an ignorant outside source would just appear as random noise. And yet we can easily ascribe the material manner in which it made its way from one to the other. Just because we currently can't directly encode\decode the exact means in which the mind creates these scenes, it's not hard at all to build mental models that a network of synapses could be responsible for a very similar thing from my perspective.
Also decoupling 'blue' from it's physical properties would inherently remove any relevance of the color between us. I agree with and also wonder do two people see 'blue' as the same color sensation, but the only means we have to compare that experience between two separate minds is both looking at a light source in the 450nm spectrum. We have no means to convey the experience itself, only the relation of understanding any further experiences with the first. I'm not sure that it matters much though. Another computer analogy, although Linux and Windows differ a good bit on how they would internally configure a PDF document to be displayed on the screen from it's initial bits, the end result should be close enough that we can both agree on the information the screen displays.
On the second, I'd stand beside my original complaint. This to me draws from the God of the Gaps issues, that somehow if the way we've described the world in every other recognized way is unable to put forward a valid reasoning for a phenomenon with our current level of understanding, we should instead ascribe a non material or physical level of power to explain it that has never been shown or proven to offer a provable valid reasoning for anything. That to me sounds rather optimistic.
> The sensation of seeing blue is clearly, to me, unrelated to the material aspects of blue light or the interaction of that light on the cells in my retina, or the electric signals of neurons in my brain.
Why is it your assumption that the sensation of seeing something is anything other than simply the network of neurons in one part of your brain firing in concert in response to visual stimuli? Why is the color purple, which is a mix of blue and red, also perceived as an intermediate between blue and red if the sensation of seeing a color is not linked to it's actual, physical properties and how they interact with your visual sense organs?
