[Zigurd]

I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.

[cscurmudgeon]

Whatever I say will be a repeat of what has been argued for thousands of years. Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

[Zigurd]

> Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.

[cscurmudgeon]

I am a physicist by training and I was a hard core reductionist. But then, reduction to physics is just another philosophical stance and not an inductively generated statement like the laws of physics. Also, induction (empirical not mathematical) is not fool proof like deduction.

Even if we arrive at a TOE, how do we justify that the universe will always obey those laws in the future? Physical reductionism is easy to understand but upon closer inspection seems to lack a strong foundation.

Also, the laws of physics have zero consequence on logic and mathematics upon which the enterprise of physics rests on along with empirical data.