Cethin

It’s mostly a black flag, but red is the secondary color.

Idk why that is so hard for you to even ponder

I can obviously ponder it. I’ve shown that. It’s just that there’s no reason to believe it’s any more real than Harry Potter is. It may make you feel nice, but it doesn’t do anything. If consciousness can’t be defined by whoever is positing the idea then it’s not useful to consider.

So string theory isn’t science either show me where string theory has been proven in any sort of way

String theory is not really, no. It’s theoretical physics. There are experiments that were designed to test it and they all have failed. String theory is a useful mathematical model to predict some results, but it’s not more than that. It’s also almost certainly wrong, but it can still be useful. It’s also almost certainly wrong, because it fails to make new predictions that come true. It can just adapt to give the correct result after we know what it should be. It’s useful, but it doesn’t make it true.

So, by your definition, mystical stuff is just things we can’t explain right now. People in the past have thought the same thing and been proven wrong. That’s a bad method for understanding things.

How? Science is based on making models from empirical observations about the world and yourself

Science requires falsafiability. It’s fine to belive other things, but science it a method, not a belief system.

one of these empirical observations is the observation that your phenomenal consciousness actually exists, seemingly in opposition to the physical world, maybe we should perhaps include that fact in our models?

Nothing I’ve seen seems to imply it’s outside of our models. You haven’t explained why that’s the case. We know how the humans brain and nervous system functions. It isn’t magic anymore.

the same consciousness that doesn’t really fit anywhere in our purely quantitative descriptions of the universe.

How does it not fit in our quantitative descriptions? We can measure its activity. It behaves differently when in a coma, or when thinking about different things, or when dead. We can grow neurons and form connections with them outside the brain to do computations. We can’t make anything as complex as the brain yet obviously, but we understand how it functions. What part of it doesn’t fit in a perfectly quantitative description.

I’d love for some mystical thing to exist, but literally every mystical thing people have believed for tens of thousands of years has been wrong. Why should we expect any different here? Lightning isn’t caused by spirits in the mountains dancing, a god throwing lightning bolts, or anything else mystical. We can’t fully describe the mechanisms at work perfectly, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand it. We could assume it’s something mystical into the gaps because it sounds cool, but theres no reason to think it isn’t something material that can be learned.

You aren’t conscious when you’re in a coma, correct? That’s a measurable way the system can mess up and we can detect. You also aren’t conscious when you’re dead, right? Yet another measurable thing. We can detect brain activity and see certain regions are used for certain things. We can also detect anomalous behavior in the brain. We can tell when the system isn’t working as expected.

Nobody has anywhere near a coherent account of how a purely physical system produces (or equates to) subjective conscious experience.

We can easily explain how a physical system produces consciousness. We may not be able to point to exactly what it is, but we can describe it and describe how that can happen. It’s not mystical. It’s just complex. We can’t reproduce it yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand how the brain functions.

Why should science be forever married to a reductive physicalist account of the universe?

Because that’s literally a basic requirment of science. It relies on falsafiability. You can believe whatever you want, but science relies on stuff being measurable. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but that’s how it functions.

Also, you call it reductive. I don’t think it’s reductive. I think it’s more reductive to just say “consciousness exists” than to say “consciousness is a complex system that can develop in nature”. Just because it’s physical doesn’t mean it’s reductive. Saying “it just is because it is” seems much more reductive.

Edit: Also, despite people believing mystical things for most of history, they were never right. Why should this be any different?

Bart tells people to eat his shorts, I’m assuming to get them near his Barthole.