but such a reduction (even establishing the existence of such a reduction) would count as a major empirical advance.
I think Eliezer makes the point that the specificity of the various neurological disorders and breakdowns forms some very strong evidence for how stuff happens in the brain.
to simply say "consciousness" is a convenient label for a set of neuronal interactions is to elide an important and substantive problem.
No, because you're here, talking about phenomenal experience, and it feeling like things. Imagine following that causal trail back; where do you expect to end up as the intermediary of going from world to photons to retina to brain to ? to brain to fingers to talking about phenomenally perceiving the world? In an area underlaid with completely different physical laws, that attaches to the brain by a bridging system? What would that even explain? Nothing. It's not an explanation, it's mysticism slotted in to explain a mysterious-to-you process. We have not seen any evidence that the physics of the brain are in any way magical. We've taken apart brains and no mysterious things have happened. We've cut into living brains and we've practically watched specific pieces of functionality fall away. With modern scanning tech, we can watch as memories are retrieved. We can literally look at reconstructions of your visual imagination. What does it take?
The entirety of dualism is an argument from ignorance. "I cannot imagine how conscious experience of reality could arise from physical laws." -> "Hence, physics is not the complete answer." No, hence your imagination is limited.
Many post-Newtonian physicists believed that physical reality consisted of just matter in motion in absolute space. For them, physicalism meant reducing everything to particle interactions. The only nodes in the fundamental causal graph were properties of particles. However, it gradually became clear that reducing all physical phenomena to this basis was a very difficult, if not insurmountable, task. But by introducing a new element into the fundamental physical ontology -- fields -- one could in fact formulate much better physical theories.
Now consider a ...
In Zombies! Zombies? Eliezer mentions that one aspect of consciousness is that it can causally affect the real world, e.g. cause you to say "I feel conscious right now", or result in me typing out these words.
Even if a generally accepted mechanism of consciousness has not been found yet are there any tentative explanations for this "can change world" property? Googling around I was unable to find anything (although Zombies are certainly popular).
I had an idea of how this might work, but just wanted to see if it was worth the effort of writing.