Reddit reviews The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain

>I think that the original poster, Dennett, and their ilk, probably believe we are zombies...

I don't think any serious physicalist actually believes this.

>They would say that believing that consciousness is anything but the physical interactions is like believing life has a special force which animates it (i.e. vitalism), as opposed to being merely physics and chemistry.

Quite right. I also see the anti-physicalist arguments as using more or less the same logic as the "god of the gaps" arguments for theism.

>We actually have experiences. The world that present-day science describes only accounts for matter and energy, that is, physical, observable, mechanical interactions. The fact that it feels like something to have those interactions occur in our bodies is not accounted for by present-day science.

Agreed.

>It's just that to do so a new fundamental property of matter has to be postulated because there is simply no room for the phenomenon to be categorized or explained.

I'm not sure how you got to this conclusion. Why would we need to postulate a new property of matter? Why couldn't conscious experience just be a systems-level property of say, a suitably configured analog recurrent neural network? We can already demonstrate how abilities like inductive generalization, face recognition, sensorimotor coordination, grammatical tranformation, text-to-speech, many others can emerge as systems-level properties in a suitably configured and trained network, and as Paul Churchland argues here recurrent networks share many properties with conscious awareness, such as steerable attention and short-term memory.

Do you have an argument that conscious experience could not be a systems-level property of brains that we simply don't understand yet?

I was a student of the Churchlands and I've read their work extensively (not all of it, but a BIG chunk) and I don't remember seeing anywhere that they make those really extreme claims that people often attribute to them. It's kind of an ongoing puzzle to me trying to figure out where they said the things that everybody seems to think they said.

>In essence they are extreme qualophobes - they not only deny external qualia like "red," but internal qualia as well such as emotions.

I'd be interested in a citation here too, as this interpretation goes against what I've read in their writing and personal conversations I've had. They are eliminativists about folk psychology insofar as it relates to the language of thought hypothesis (i.e. they don't buy into the idea that the brain is fundamentally a sentence-cruncher or a manipulator of propositional attitudes) but when it comes to qualia and consciousness, they are rampant reductionists and believe that neuroscience science will explain qualia. In chapter 10 of Neuroscience at work for example, Paul argues for a proposed reduction of color qualia. In Chapter 8 of The Engine of Reason he proposes a neuro-computational reduction of consciousness. He doesn't just think humans are conscious either - he goes on to argue a couple chapters later that you see evidence of conscious experience in mammals generally and probably even lower branches of the evolutionary tree.

Maybe some of their earlier stuff is more radical? If anybody out there has a citation, I'd be interested to follow up on it.

>Some see them and the rest of the EM school as the heirs to the Behaviorists, but all the Behaviorists said was that the "black box" of internal states could not be studied scientifically - they never said that internal states didn't exist.

Those people are referring not to the black-box psychological behaviorism of Skinner and Watson, but to the analytic behaviorism of Gilbert Ryle, which attempted to reduce mental states to dispositions to behave. Paul once told me that he used to be an analytic behaviorist way back before some of the other (more plausible) materialist views emerged. Eliminative materalists are a diverse bunch though; they all agree that there is something wrong with folk psychology but they can disagree radically as to what (for the Churchlands, it's propositional attitudes, for others it's qualia or consciousness).

Wow major tangent, whee!