[anon84873628]

>If physicalism is true, then everything that can be observed must reduce to objective third person facts.

You are erroneously equating "physicalism" with "reductive physicalism". It's clear to many of us that qualia are something subjective and non-physical yet emerge from physical processes.

[naasking]

Yes, people are capable of convincing themselves of all kinds of nonsense. The kind of ontological emergence you would require in such a model of qualia is still of a completely different kind than any other kind of emergence, and so still requires extending the ontology of basic physicalism. There seems to be very little motivation to do so at this point. Let's not repeat the mistakes of vitalism.

[anon84873628]

That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others.

Of course consciousness seems more mysterious because we don't have the explanation yet. Looking down at the levels we supervene doesn't have the same mystique, though they would be just as inscrutable if trying to look up.

Going from quantum field theory to Newtonian mechanics is just as weird a departure as the reverse. And does Newtonian mechanics prepare you for the existence of Bayesian statistics? Biological agents bouncing around randomly? The gestalt of an ecosystem?

There's no reason to assert that we can't one day have the math for describing consciousness too.

[naasking]

> That seems to be a value judgement about whether consciousness is a categorically different type of "ontological emergence" compared to others.

It's not a value judgment to point out that objective third person facts can logically entail other objective third person facts, but cannot logically entail subjective first person facts as with qualia. That's the whole point of the hard problem. All forms of ontological emergence we've actually seen are the first sort of entailment, but to accept and explain qualia with ontological emergence, you need to accept the second kind of emergence, which is a whole new thing we've never seen and we're supposed to accept it only for consciousness because we have such a hard time accepting that our perceptions on this could be flawed. It's simply more plausible that we're mistaken about subjective first person facts IMO.