I don't quite think this is going to go anywhere. Take care. — AmadeusD

This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney.

“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney. — T Clark

Have you thought about working that up into an article?

This is all pitiful pseudoscience—“you can't get out what you don't put in”— baloney. — T Clark

I have sometimes used analogies to try to get this idea across. But I really don't think it's necessary. Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials?

Do you think you can make something non-physical with only physical building materials? — Patterner

I don't find this question as helpful as you do, because I think the "stuff" model used here doesn't capture what we're interested in. There are no non-physical things on offer.

Set aside consciousness for a moment.

What about something like your voice? The sound you make when you speak is obviously physical, and produced physically by physical, if biological, machinery. Physical as you like. But that's not your voice. Your voice is the individual pattern of pronunciation and accent and prosody and timbre, and we could ask about those individually as well. We know how you as an organism produce sound—there's no mystery about the mechanisms involved—but there are a lot of different voices you could have ended up with, and nothing about your physical makeup that could predict this one.

A similar example is gait. I've been told I have my father's walk. My brother does not. It's again a clearly physical process, but the pattern of how I walk, or how I stand, my carriage and posture, there are who knows how many possible patterns of behavior I could have ended up with, all using this same body and the same mechanisms.

These are not even processes exactly that we're talking about, but patterns in how those processes occur. Obviously a better analogy for consciousness than a "thing".

So would you call your voice or my gait a physical thing? Not walking and talking, mind you, which we can just stipulate are physical processes, if not things, but voice, gait, carriage, and so on.

First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist, such that consciousness has to be found a home in that picture (a project that is then problematic).

This is already problematic - for if making a particular assumption generates problems that would not have arisen otherwise, then the sensible thing to do is to give up the assumption, not double-down on it! — Clarendon

Clarendon, may I interest you in going back to your original post and provide me the opportunity to dissect it?

When you start your OP with First, I take it that 'problems' of consciousness only arise if you assume that physical things are what ultimately exist,, this is already problematic and doesn't do justice to the principles of physicalism. Physicalism is a supervenient principle -- the proponents of physicalism never claimed that the physical is what ultimately exists. I stand to be corrected if you could point me to the right direction.

A supervenient thesis doesn't claim that there's ultimate reality represented by only one entity -- that job was done by the pre-socratics. And we're not in that epoch anymore.
What physicalism claims is that there is causation, there is energy, there's science to support the entailment of consciousness. We have progressed so much in science that we can absolutely claim that the external stimulation can change our brain. Consciousness is not one way -- it is a bidirectional interaction between the external stimuli and the mechanisms in the brain.

You can study consciousness by science. But the problem is, you will not see or observe actual consciousness itself, no matter what you dissect and look into. It is not in the form of matter.

You will only observe the telltale signs, functions and behavior of consciousness from the conscious living people and animals. — Corvus

I don't know what else to make of this comment, Corvus, but to simply say if an opinion could be marked "Fail", this is it.

No one here, or in any philosophical writing I've read, is asking to observe the embodiment of consciousness. What would that look like? A square-triangular oblong?
And what does "You will only observe the telltale signs...from the conscious living people and animals" mean? Our whole constitution is conscious! It is certainly not just telltale signs.