[Windchaser]

Yes. Even to this reductionist, “neural activity” is insufficient to describe to consciousness in the same way that “it’s physics” is insufficient to describe how a car works.

I could put a bunch of metal and rubber and gasoline in a pile and light it on fire — all the necessary ingredients for a car — but it wouldn’t create a working automobile. The arrangement of the objects and processes matters.

In the same way, if you put a bunch of brain cells together in a Petri dish, but their connections or firings were disordered, I wouldn’t expect consciousness. “Neural activity” is thus insufficient on its own, but this I doesn’t mean reductionism is incorrect. It just means you didn’t correctly reduce the problem to the correct constituent parts. You left some out.

[runarberg]

Reductionism is a theoretical framework. It is neither right nor wrong, Sometimes a theory based on reductionism is wrong, but reductionism it self is never wrong.

Reductionism usually includes interactions of the lower parts (unless you are an atomist; in which case go back to ancient Greece), I never denied this. However even with the interactions, reductionism is still a lacking framework to describe consciousness. If it wasn’t so lacking it would be more popular among the people who actually study the mind.