There is a difference between a working hypothesis and an unfalsifiable dogma.
Is my position less falsifiable than yours? No, most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable. I think that's a strong hint that it's a flawed concept.
Could explain what assumption you are dropping, and why, without using the word magical.
The assumption that "consciousness" is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head. I dropped it because I found that physicalism explains everything better. "Better" doesn't mean that I have all the answers about anything, it just means that the answers consciousness gives are even worse.
I don't understand what your problem with "magical" is?
I'd prefer if you settled on one claim.
Well, I suppose an assumption could be unnecessary without being meaningless, so the words aren't identical, but I do refer to the same thing, when I use them in this context. I also recall explaining how a "meaningless" statement can be considered "false". The question is, why are you so uncomfortable with paraphrasing? Do you feel that there are some substantial differences? Honestly, I mostly do this to clarify what I mean, not to obscure it.
That would be the problem for which there is no evidence except your say-so.
The "robot pain" problem is the problem where you think that maybe robots could feel pain, but you have not even a shred of an idea how to test if they do. That's a pretty big problem, regardless of what I say. Now, when I ask if this or that idea solves "robot pain" problem, I'm not asking if it produces an actual test, I just ask for a smallest hint that maybe the test could exist.
You can function practically without a concept of gravity, as people before Newton did.
That's ridiculous. The mathematical law of gravity was written down by Newton, but the concept of gravity, in the sense that "things fall down", is something most animals have. Do you literally think that nobody noticed gravity before Newton?
most statements about consciousness are unfalsifiable
That's not the problem.
The assumption that "consciousness" is a meaningful (but supposedly poorly understood) concept that explains something happening either in the outside world or in my own head.
The assumption is more that consciousness is something that needs explaining,
I also recall explaining how a "meaningless" statement can be considered "false".
That's wrong. If you can put a truth-value on a sentence , it is meaningful.
...The question is, why are you so
(This post grew out of an old conversation with Wei Dai.)
Imagine a person sitting in a room, communicating with the outside world through a terminal. Further imagine that the person knows some secret fact (e.g. that the Moon landings were a hoax), but is absolutely committed to never revealing their knowledge of it in any way.
Can you, by observing the input-output behavior of the system, distinguish it from a person who doesn't know the secret, or knows some other secret instead?
Clearly the only reasonable answer is "no, not in general".
Now imagine a person in the same situation, claiming to possess some mental skill that's hard for you to verify (e.g. visualizing four-dimensional objects in their mind's eye). Can you, by observing the input-output behavior, distinguish it from someone who is lying about having the skill, but has a good grasp of four-dimensional math otherwise?
Again, clearly, the only reasonable answer is "not in general".
Now imagine a sealed box that behaves exactly like a human, dutifully saying things like "I'm conscious", "I experience red" and so on. Moreover, you know from trustworthy sources that the box was built by scanning a human brain, and then optimizing the resulting program to use less CPU and memory (preserving the same input-output behavior). Would you be willing to trust that the box is in fact conscious, and has the same internal experiences as the human brain it was created from?
A philosopher believing in computationalism would emphatically say yes. But considering the examples above, I would say I'm not sure! Not at all!