[ithkuil]

Isn't that a bit extreme? Sure we don't have "the answer" but saying that the amount of things we know about how our brain works, from behavioral rhings how can our perception system can he tricked, biases in our cognition modes, the mechanism of memory and how it fails ... down to more low leven things about how the neuronal tissue works, neuroplasticity, the effects of brain injury on cognition (my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people).

There is tons and tons of research. As with all of science there is tons of crap among the good work. As with all of science, it requires a lot of work to understand the state of the art and build upon it.

Dismissing all of that says more about you than about our scientific understanding. Yes, we humans do prefer simple explanation that fit in our heads and that are easier to achieve. That's why so many people find more compelling to believe in conspiracy theories of various kinds: they offer a clear cut, simple and total explaination instead of the messy and partial understanding of a real, ongoing rational and scientific enquiry.

After all We do prefer explainations that "make sense". On a first glance, what's wrong with that? Isn't science also trying to figure out what "makes sense"?

There are plenty of examples where our intuitions clash with reality and in some case we ended up accepting that (e.g. most people can accept that we're living on a giant sphere even if it doesn't feel so), in some other cases we kinda-sorta accept it (quantum physics) and it other cases we flat out refuse to (questions around consciousness)

[whittingtonaaon]

I agree with you. The way I stated it was a little blunt. But no matter what the hard sciences show, they don’t really make claims about subjective experience. This is simply because the hard sciences by definition make no such claims. They can find things like correlations between states of matter and claimed subjective experience, but this doesn’t really get to the point. I think if it ever does, it will be such a huge revolution that what we’re left with should be called something other than physics or chemistry.

[visarga]

> correlations between states of matter and claimed subjective experience

correlations between the bits in the video memory and the claimed IMDB score of the movie

I think you're looking for consciousness on the wrong level.

[ithkuil]

I think people often conflate consciousness with the perception of consciousness (or consciousness of consciousness, or meta-consciousness).

Imagine a being that is "conscious* of some experience, but lacks the ability of reflecting about the fact that it has just witnessed an experience. Is such a being "conscious"? Answers will vary but I suspect they vary because people are answering different questions. Some are thinking about the meta-consciousness and some about direct consciousness.

[aquaduck]

> my favourite is when patients subjected to corpus callosotomy probably function as two independent brains and yet the individual cannot tell from inside, it doesn't "feel" like two people

My layman interpretation of this fact is that consciousness/sentience doesn't originate in the cerebral cortex, but rather, within deeper brain structures.