I don't see any contradiction between brain secreting thought and reason being sovereign. You can think of emergence, if that helps. — Manuel

'Emergence' doesn't help. If a brown bear emerges from a cave, then I will presume it went in there some time previously, or was born in there.

Whatever the substance is that Priestly proposes, it is not something known to science.

Emergence meaning a totally new property arising from what went before. Some go as far as calling it radical emergence, which means that we have no idea how this happens in nature. Chomsky, for example, takes it as a given, as did Priestley.

Priestley was writing this as a reaction to Newton's work. So it's totally because of science that Priestley said what he said. And now we have quantum physics which goes way beyond anything Newton could have dreamed of. Again, this is well documented by Chomsky. I can send you the essay, if you like. It's extremely interesting, I think.

Newton was shocked that the matter he thought existed, is not that matter of which the world is made of. As he famously said:

''It is inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should, without the mediation of something else which is not material, operate upon and affect other matter without mutual contact, as it must be, if gravitation in the sense of Epicurus, be essential and inherent in it.... That gravity should be innate, inherent, and essential to matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum, without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it."

Notice he said "is not material" meaning mechanical. We have not recovered from that insight. Yet any scientist today will tell you that gravity is physical.

I think I'm familiar with that essay. It's the one where Chomsky says we have no coherent conception of a body, right? (It's Sunday morning here I'm out for the day.)

You could theoretically reproduce all the findings of cognitive science in symbolic form, such that an alien intelligence could interpret and understand them. But you could not reproduce the experience of being human in such an objective medium. It is not amenable to third-person reduction. — Wayfarer

I want to say "I just don't get it," when I talk about the so-called hard problem, but I do get it. I get why people see it as a problem. It's because they somehow think their self-awareness is special and wonderful. But it's not. It's just one more mental process/behavior. We deal with that kind of thing all the time in our lives.

We look at animal behavior and the behavior of other humans. We see behavior and infer mental processes. That dog is angry. I can tell by the way he growls and snarls. That rabbit is afraid. I can tell by the way he startles and runs. That woman loves her children. I can tell by the gentle way she treats them. Also, if we speak the same language, she can tell me that she loves them. We have stories we can narrate for all of them. It's only when we start dealing with ourselves that things fall apart. We no longer want to recognize that we are telling stories. It must mean more. I can feel that it means more. We are untrustworthy narrators of our own story.

It's because they somehow think their self-awareness is special and wonderful. — T Clark

That’s not what Chalmers says, so maybe you don’t ‘get it’. But, hey, you’re in good company - Daniel Dennett doesn’t ‘get it’, either.

We look at animal behavior and the behavior of other humans — T Clark

what the Empiricist speaks of and describes as sense-knowledge is not exactly sense-knowledge, but sense-knowledge plus unconsciously introduced intellective ingredients, -- sense-knowledge in which he has made room for reason without recognizing it. A confusion which comes about all the more easily as, on the one hand, the senses are, in actual fact, more or less permeated with reason in man, and, on the other, the merely sensory psychology of animals, especially of the higher vertebrates, goes very far in its own realm and imitates intellectual knowledge to a considerable extent. — Jacques Maritain

That's part of it, but he mentions that specific point in many places.

He also discuses how Hume concluded that Newton's greatest merit was that Newton "seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature, he shewed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy; and thereby restored [Nature’s] ultimate secrets to that obscurity, in which they ever did and ever will remain."

He talks about how Locke saw no contradiction in God "supperadding" thought to matter. He describes Russell's idea that Physics "seeks itself seeks only to discover "the causal skeleton of the world, [while studying] percepts only in there cognitive aspects; their other aspects lie outside its purview" - though we recognize their existence, at the highest grade of certainty in fact."

And much else. If these ideas sound familiar, then you probably read it. If not, whenever you want, I can send it to you.

I conceptualise thought as an intermodulation between sensory input and the mind resulting in the formation of ideas, emotions, shared perspective etc. Intermodulation examples can be seen in non- linear devices and radio waves where two signals modulate to form an intermodulation.