Thanks for the link. Some interesting ideas about how beings can feel and act independent of a central nervous system.

This is what is in question, I think. Nagel, in the passage I quoted in response to @Wayfarer, doesn't think this follows. And I don't see why it must, though no one would deny that we learn more about an experience if we're the ones having it.

Yes, I’m not denying that. I was emphasising the importance of mind as body and that different kinds of body have different kinds of experience, unique to them. I agree that rational intelligent minds can observe other kinds of bodies (minds), but it’s always an observation from the perspective of the experience of different kind of body, (third person) when it is done. Also, I think we can (we have the capacity to) as rational intelligent beings break out of our inherent perspective and develop understanding of other experiences.

Or at least they may be. Unless we stipulate a certain meaning for "experience" which we're not entitled to ("everything that happens to an entity is an experience"), I don't think we can know whether a tree has them.

But surely it has the experience of being a tree? Yes, I know we never be able to know for certain, but it has a shared presence with us is our physical domain. A domain where there is a common scale, a tree is approximately ten times our height and lives about as long, or a few times longer than us. Senses and reacts to stimuli in that environment which we sense and react to. If there is mind of some kind in the body of the tree as there is in our bodies, surely there are experiences being felt. Albeit so far removed from our kind of experience, that it may be inconceivable to us. For example, it is known that trees in a forest communicate with other trees. They may have a feeling of being in a group, chemical messages are being sent through the group. They may be detecting the presence of destructive fungi at one end of the forest and sending messages about it to other parts of the forest etc.

We should note that Nagel qualifies this in an important way. “Something will inevitably be lost,” he says – namely, what it is like to have the subjective experience. “No objective conception of the mental world can include it all.” But do we ask the objective viewpoint to include everything, or only (only!) to understand everything?

This is the nub of the issue, there is an entire perspective, or vista involved in experience which is missing from the objective account. “What it is like to have the subjective experience”, “what it is like”, only hints at it, but is itself conceptual language, talking about concepts to other concepts. In order to understand the experience, one has to be the being experiencing it. And by being, I’m not talking of the mind*, I’m talking of a living creature. Also the use of the word subjective, is confining experience to thought and reflections on thought. Experience doesn’t at first include thought, that comes later, although thought itself is an experience, it is experience of a reflective activity in the brain following experiences.

To illustrate this, I will go back to the tree, what is it like to be a tree? Many people will say, a tree doesn’t have a mind, a central nervous system, so doesn’t have experiences and without a brain, it can’t know what it is like. That it’s meaningless to ask the question, one might aswell ask what it is like to be a stone. They are missing the point and in doing so, throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Who are we to say a tree doesn’t have experiences, it shares the same biology as us (short of having a nervous system) it is alive, responsive, can be healthy, can be diseased. It has a presence during storms, heat waves, a lifetime of seasons. It is there, is reacting to, is growing through all these events and circumstances. These are events being experienced by a living being. Not only this, but as a being, the tree will have an inner life, a feeling of being alive of being a me, a myself, just like we do. It doesn’t require a brain to know what it is like, or to have experiences.
Now apply this logic to a human and we might be getting closer to what it is like to experience something, including experiencing subjectivity.

*I don’t confine mind to thought, thinking. For me it is in a real sense, the whole being of a living entity. So there is a kind of thinking going on in a being, independent of the brain, in the biological activity in the body. The thinking going on in the brain is a more integrated intelligent expression of this.

Reason has no authority beyond consistency, and must remain true to that which supports it, i.e. actual experience, or lose all coherency.

And this Reason can tell us that we, or the animals being discussed, don’t and can’t know anything about the world. Other than what is presented to us via our senses. Which necessarily includes experiences. That we can deduce some things about the structure of the world by experimentation. But that is all. And yes we can philosophise about it all to our hearts content, but those philosophical thoughts can’t get past the limits I’ve just pointed out.
Except in one thing, the basic philosophical calculation that we know our mind, our being exists. So we do know one thing, this can not be doubted. Yes, we know there appears to be something else, but all we have is appearances, so how can we know anything about it.

We are like the crocodile surviving very efficiently in the world, while not understanding anything about it. The only difference being, we have worked out one of two more things about what is going on.

I've lost track of what we were disagreeing about, or whether we were disagreeing at all.

I quite liked the way the thread had become a peaceful, friendly, discussion about the topic. So I went off peste about the idea of a general theory of consciousness, or mind.
What I was suggesting is that there are ways to look at the issue which do accommodate idealism etc, but which take a new approach, as opposed to the orthodox materialism, reductionism, dualism, versus monism etc etc. I gave one example, to view all life as one being, as a starting point, there are many more.

I don't think we are one "hive mind" at all―look at the great differences between cultures, and the polarizations within particular cultures.

Those differences don’t preclude what I’m suggesting here. Yes there are many differences even between individuals in a family. But these differences are on the surface, the world of surfaces that we know. I’m implying there is a uniformity beneath the surface. If we look at biology we can start to see the uniformity. If we list the organs in the body we will find that they are present in most animals without exception. This is even more so when we look at internal cellular structure. Cells as we find them now have changed little in their essential structure for over a billion years.

Each tree has a unique pattern of branches and twigs, the possibilities for variation are almost infinite, so we can conclude that no two trees in the universe will be alike. But this is an approach which only sees the variation. I’m suggesting an approach from the opposite direction, that of unity, unity in life. Rather than looking for infinite variation, to look for unification. If one is able to view all life on earth as one being, one is able to follow a line of reasoning stripped bare of many of the tripping hazards in these discussions. I don’t like to get bogged down in discussions about DNA, but in essence all DNA is the same, it’s only the sequence that differs, the encoding. This encoding determines everything about the variation in the body of the being in question. Perhaps there is a uniformity beneath the workings of the DNA, there is probably a whole world to discover about how quantum theory can be applied to this. Not to mention discoveries about how life first developed and can be synthesised.

and I don't think we are locked in our own little solipsistic worlds.

I’m only suggesting this in viewing the one being (our biosphere as one being), as a whole, this being lives in a solipsistic world in it’s interactions with the neumenon of the world. All individual animals and plants are living in different aspects of that whole experience. It is solipsistic in the sense that it is an isolated arena, that of a planet in space (the sun does exert some influence).

I even think it is possible that we share some kind of collective unconscious, as Jung suggested,

Quite, but not just unconsciousness, but a common arena of activity. A common landscape, scale, temporal manifold. Take two people sitting in a restaurant eating pasta. They may have different hair clothes sauce on their food. But so much of what is going on is a shared experience and circumstance, one which may well require an underlying unity of being for it to happen.

I see Nature as endlessly creative and diverse.

None of this precludes what I am proposing. It is a diversity within an isolated arena of activity.

Because part of the problem with experience is that it’s so close to us that we don’t even see it. And it’s only in contemplative practice that you really have to deal with it.

It’s a bit like the idea that a fish in a fish bowl doesn’t know that it’s suspended in water. It doesn’t notice the water, the way that we don’t notice air, unless it’s windy. The fish can’t comprehend what water is, perhaps we can’t comprehend something too.

The practitioner of meditative practices knows about this and experiences, at some point, being, being absent our conditioned world.

And how all things in that context seem to me may not be how they seem to you―even though there will likely be commonalities due to the fact that we are both human.

I don’t think this is such a big issue (although it may be a stumbling block empirically), yes it’s true that there is no way of making a direct comparison between minds. But it may be the framing of the question that’s at fault. Rather like what J said.
For me this question is tackled by changing perspective. We know that we are (biologically) a colony. Indeed, we are largely clones (I am aware of sexual variation and heredity). Our constitution is identical, similar to how it is for trees. So it might be worth viewing people as one being (colony) divided into units within a colony. So we are identical, like trees, but with variation in the shape of the tree, or the variety (let’s put speciation to one side for now), some seed might fall on fallow ground some on fertile ground etc.
Now this brings collective consciousness more to the fore. If we treat humanity as one being, the question of what someone else is thinking disappears. If you think about it 99.9% of what we do is identical, with variation, as in trees. Variation in thinking and knowledge, indeed belief might be of little import and as a whole, the colony includes the full spectrum of thought and mental activity and each individual contributes in their own unique way.
Personally I go further and regard the entire biosphere as one colony with each kind of plant, or animal expressing a different aspect of the whole. A lot can be worked out about each from comparison with others. All animals and plants (leaving viruses etc to one side for now), are colonies of identical cells, with very slight variation and where the differences to be found between different kinds encoded in the DNA, not in different cell architecture, (in multi cellular organisms the DNA dictates different roles for cells, which will cause them to adapt to perform different tasks, like people playing different roles in society).
This enables me to view one being (colony) interacting with one material (the world). One being and one neumenon. One soul approaching one (instance of) neumenon producing one being. One undifferentiated soul* approaching one undifferentiated neumenon, resulting in, well the history of the world.

* replace the word soul with your own preference.

The problem with trying to model consciousness itself is that it is the thing doing the modeling, and we cannot "get outside of it", so we seem to be stuck with making inferences about what it might be from studying the brain being the best we can do, or going with what our intuitions "from inside" tell us about its nature.

This is what I was talking about in the other thread, (Cosmos created mind), I am interested in developing ways to break out of this straight jacket. But I don’t have the philosophical language to ground it in digestible philosophy. It just comes across as fanciful wishful thinking.

I see two initial problems, firstly the problem of how a mind can talk about itself with itself and not be convinced that it’s impossible to do it impartially, or that it’s an insurmountable stumbling block.
Secondly how we break out of the state that the world presents us with to some kind of objective starting point, or foundation.

In mysticism (my brand of mysticism) the first problem is covered extensively with a series of processes and practices. But which comes across to a philosopher as dogmatic spirituality, or wishful thinking.
Secondly I have developed a series of conceptual tools by which one can break out of the straight jacket of the world being the way it presents to us. Which again comes across to philosophers as woo woo, spirituality, or wishful thinking.

I don't find it plausible that how they present to us is determined by consciousness, but I think it is more reasonable to think that it is determined by the physical constitutions of our sensory organs, nervous system and brain, as well as by the actual structures of the things themselves.

Yes, but the physical constitutions themselves are parts of the structures of the things themselves. Even the mind, via the brain, as used in our day to day thinking is shaped, framed by these structures. Sooner, or later we have to start considering something that isn’t shaped in this way, in consciousness, but is nevertheless shaped by other as yet unrecognised structures. This is usually described as the soul, although I prefer to describe it as the higher mind.*

Unless we go there, no one is going to make any progress on putting together a unified theory.

* by higher mind, I mean a part of our mind that is recognised as conceptually free, or independent of the mind clothed in the world that we inhabit mostly in day to day life. Like a kind of Platonic region, concerned with pure thought, being etc.

Nothing you've described is inconsistent with physicalism.

That’s not surprising because I’m in agreement with most of what physicalism says. I was narrowing down what part of existence we know. Existence as a whole and the mechanism of existence is not part of that. So to say;

-that mind is foundational to existence;

Is to conflate that bit which isn’t part of it with the existence we know. The bit of existence which we experience isn’t all of existence and isn’t foundational. This is self evident because we have limited capacities to experience and know things.

This is a mereological issue. Just because objects are reducible to particles doesn't imply they are not actual, functional entities in the world. By "functional", I mean that they can be analyzed in terms of their interactions with other functional entities.

Yes, but I’m saying something broader than that. For example in a thought experiment I can say the Earth is a being, Gaia for Gaia the physical world might be like a thin protective layer in her skin, that she is barely aware of and her family is made up of other planets and stars. In conversation what to her is the equivalent of a word spoken in a minute might in our terms be a few million years of seismic events and most of her life is an experience of transcendent realities entirely inconceivable to us. Rather like comparing our lives to that of an individual cell in our bodies. The cell could not comprehend, or understand anything about our lives and yet we share consciousness and there is a germ of being that the cell feels, which we and Gaia also feel in some way.

I can't imagine why you would think physicalists necessarily have to deny the subjectivity associated with being human. But it's irrelevant, because you still have provided no justification for the ontological claims I highlighted:
-that mind is foundational to existence;
- that the supposed ‘unperceived object’ neither exists nor does not exist. Nothing whatever can be said about it.

(I’m not speaking for Wayfarer, rather saying it how I see it.)
It’s not a claim about existence, it’s a claim about our world, the world we find ourselves in. The point being that our mind as an intrinsic aspect of our being interacts with the natural external realm (neumenon), such that what we experience is commensurate with the character of our being. Or in other words, the world meets us in a form appropriate to our nature of being. In the case of a plant, or tree, the neumenon will be meet it with an entirely different experience appropriate to its being. Something which it would be impossible for us to understand without being a tree ourselves.

As for the unperceived object refer to Kant, or quantum physics. It’s just a soup of interacting infinitesimally small particles passing energies around. It is only experienced as an object when experienced by a being on our scale (approx’ 6 feet tall as opposed to infinitesimally small), with our inherent sensory apparatus (I include the body as a whole in these apparatus)*

* I am working with the idea that all beings, are one being manifest as many beings in incarnation. So looking at the whole universe, it is as a whole, one being meeting one neumenon. But experienced by the beings as a vast extended universe of separate particles and beings.

For me, all we are, all we do, all we know, is derived from our interactivity with the rest of the world. I suspect there's a lot we don't know about the universe, though, and that interaction may include aspects of which we're not yet aware.

You speak a lot of sense.
I would add that there are likely things we are not aware of about ourselves which are with us at all times rather like the way we see our shadow cast by a light. Or even that we are the shadow cast by that we don’t know.

My issue is how one uses possibilities in further reasoning.

What I’m getting at here is that by examining feasible possibilities, one can see the orthodox explanations in a different light. This helps to develop a broader context and develop ways of thinking outside of the orthodox paradigm. Add into the mix the extent of what we don’t know, then one can in a sense break free of the orthodox. This is how mysticism makes use of philosophy.

An example, when contemplating being I sometimes imagine all beings are one being, manifest as many separate beings extended through time and space. So in a sense, all beings have a part of themselves which is that one being simultaneously, while living as many separate beings. This can become an axiom in a sense from which implications can be drawn about how this might offer a different view about what beings are and how they interact in the world. If I watch a murmeration of birds. Here in the U.K. you can watch vast flocks of starlings flying in formation. Displaying complex patterns which have through evolution developed the ability to confuse peregrine falcons. The flock is acting as one being in that moment. Are these birds watching each other to know how to fly in formation? Are they using some kind of telepathy? Are they literally being one being? Well in my example, they are one being, they are not watching each other, or using telepathy, but that part of themselves which is that one being. And through doing it in this way, they become extra responsive and gain an edge on the peregrine.

But...there's no reason to think this is the case- there's no evidence of it, and it's not entailed by accepted theory.

But there’s no reason to assume that it isn’t the case either. It’s a possibility, so having an understanding of what we don’t know helps us to not make assumptions, or broad brush conclusions about the world and existence. I’m not accusing you or any (with one or two exceptions maybe) of the posters here of doing this. As philosophers you are open minded about these ideas.

Now taking the idea a stage further, it brings into question what is natural, maybe only the neumenon is natural and all appearances, or phenomenon are artificial. For example, this whole big bang theory with reality emerging from a worm hole, or a singularity. It comes across like comic book pseudoscience. It makes more sense to me that what is going on is that extension (including temporal extension) is an illusion/projection (like the Truman Show) and that something more akin to the Hindu cosmogony, of transcendent being makes more sense.

I see your point, you could be seeing yourself walking in your mind. But you can also be in ignorance (in the politest possible sense) in your head too. This was my point, unless you are omniscient in your world, you are ignorant of it’s make up and origin.

You two should try a bit of mud wrestling for that (I’m joking). The Greek philosophers enjoyed a bit of wrestling.

It seems to me that you are in agreement. As long as you both accept there is something going on there that we haven’t quite got to the bottom of yet.

It seems reasonable to believe there's a great deal we don't know. But what use can be made of this fact? Does it lead anywhere?

Epistemic humility.
For me it helps to contextualise the things I do know, by realising how partial it is. Also it helps to remain open minded.

Regarding other "minds", IMO we can justifiably believe they exist in other humans, and in a diminished sense- in other animals.

Yes, but I was treating all minds on Earth as one group. I was asking about minds elsewhere.
It goes like this, there are minds with technology on earth which emerged naturally. Presumably there are other planets with minds with technology. Due to temporal variation in the development of planets and minds, there are likely to be minds far more advanced, in terms of technology (not to mention what’s going on in those other possible universes) than us. If minds are where artificial things come from (as in the example of humans), there could be highly advanced artificial things around. How do we know there aren’t artificial worlds, spacetime bubbles, universes out there? How do we know our world (known universe) isn’t artificial?

I was not talking about the world. I was talking about me, and God. :)

You see yourself standing, walking, listening and talking in the world, don’t you? So surely you can also see yourself not knowing much in the world too?

I covered that by referencing "anything inferred to exist by analysis of the universe", which means via accepted theory.

I understand your parameters and approach to this question, which I agree with. However, what we don’t know looms large to me. And yet you are sort of restricting what is natural to what has been deemed to be so by human thought. While we have no metric by which to measure how much of our world we know about and therefore, the extent of our ignorance.

I intentionally leave out mere possibilities. My definition is intended to identify what we can justifiably believe. This also applies to:

Do we know there are not artificial things outside the human mind?

Well we have one example of a mind existing. Something which is naturally emergent in biological life. So it seems reasonable to allow the possibility of other minds, creating other artificial things. Including highly advanced technologies. Which might for example have technology to control physical material, energy etc.
I say this because it seems reasonable to consider that human technology will be able to do such things in the future.

I can see me standing and walking, and hear me talking.

and not knowing much about the world you find yourself in.

Yes people like NOS4A2, don’t realise that it was their involvement in Europe and other spheres around the world which gave the US it’s dominance and superpower status. Now that they have become unreliable and untrustworthy their power will shrink, leaving a void for China to fill. Europe will now re-arm and keep Russia at bay without help from the U.S. Help which was offered in the knowledge that it was vital for the US interests in the fight against communism. That is why the U.S. remained a strong force in Europe, because they saw themselves as the defender of the free world against the spread of communism. This was their project, not a demand from Europe for them to provide security.

This is a pretty broad generalization when talking about a diverse population. I know indigenous people personally who would disagree with your statement, along with those who would agree.

I wasn’t referring to indigenous people living in modern civilisation. Rather indigenous peoples prior to their contact with modern civilisation.

They also tend to engage in murderous cultural norms, sexual assault, xenophobia and plenty of other pretty ridiculous things.

Yes, I know. I was specifically referring to how they regard the ecosystem they live in, usually a forest.

What hole do you have in mind?

Universes not causally connected, could include infinite universes entirely different to ours. But which is somehow constrained by human thought. If not a gap, a leaky sieve.

and anything not causally connected (such as alternate universes) that is inferred to exist, to have existed, or that will exist, through analysis of the universe.

That's tricky. Our knowledge of the world is in our heads, and that is (in a sense) made up - even though it corresponds to reality.

Yes, but we know it includes artificial things, so we will need to separate these out in some way. This is what philosophy is for presumably.
Do we know there are not artificial things outside the human mind? Well I think only where there are minds able to create them.

American presence there is the only deterrent Europe has ever had, and the only reason NATO stands any chance. The problem is you all have been taking advantage of the United States taxpayer for far too long without developing any way to defend yourselves.

Drinking the Kool aid again, I see.

D

Organisms, of which we are one, really, and, by that, I mean naturally, behave by evolved drives and conditioning. But for humans born into history (i.e., not prehistoric humans) our dialectical process--Mind/History--displaces our natures. We are born as a species, our drives are to bond and mate and survive together. Good and evil have no place. Mind displaces that with laws, the manifestation of those processes. And because yet another mechanism of that process is difference, not that but this, good and evil are inevitable; but not as a result of our natures.

Here’s the rub, it is the fall of man you are describing. When Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden, they were leaving their instinctive behaviours which had been shaped by evolution in their evolutionary niche. They had to develop new drives, motivations, goals to replace them. But what they didn’t realise is that those finely honed instincts and behaviours had been fined tuned for millions of years achieving a balance with their ecosystem and that it couldn’t easily be replaced. From that point on, humanity became destructive (this doesn’t include many indigenous societies who have learned to live in harmony with their ecosystem).

Why is the savage the better spiritual human being than the White man who comes with a gun and believes he is morally superior, and he needs to teach the savage about being saved and being moral? Is this justice of a god? Strange.

The White man is the savage and the Indian is morally superior. The White man has subverted the truth, twisted it around and inflated his ego. While all he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting and destroying nature for his own selfish ends.
Wherever we encounter indigenous peoples they all say the same thing, They revere their environment and seek to live in harmony with it. They respect their environment and natural balance and inherent wisdom of the animals and plants they live alongside.

and anything not causally connected (such as alternate universes) that is inferred to exist, to have existed, or that will exist, through analysis of the universe.

This might need tidying up a bit. You might have left a big hole there for other things to sneak in.

I would define natural as everything except what is made up in peoples heads. Putting the emphasis on the human mind, the only place where artificial things are created.

If you say something is 'natural', what have you said about it?

Not a lot.
Natural might be code for what humans say about it informed by science and the world of human knowledge. Not very much really, if we are considering what exists. We are only experts about what we find in front of us.

While I do not dispute your points, I should clarify. As we inevitably have violence in our conditioning, the violence is not in our natures. Killing for food or territory, though evident in nature, is not the same as war, or murder. We cannot say lion's are murderous or evil. We alone have transcended nature

Yes, I agree with your premise, but there are tendencies in our natures which appear to be there from birth for certain people to be disrupters, a tendency for psychopathy, sociopathy etc.
Such that in any society these people can disrupt or take control and themselves have to be controlled. This might be an evolutionary development.

For me, nothing can fill that gap. No one will he able to give a characterization of the intrinsic stuff talked about in the Chalmers' quote of my previous post. And this is just the nature of how descriptions and explanations work in an information processing system like a brain, imo. There are inherent limitations such as described by the munchausen trilemma.

Yes, agreed, which is why in religious and mystical practice this tendency is acknowledged and there is an effort to get past, or around it. Through the practice one learns to subjugate the intellectual mind and seek new ways of relating to the world and being. Having done this for many years, I like you, have an unfillable gap. A gap which isn’t empty, but is rather undefined, kept clean, so to speak.

If what it is like to be something can be taken as a directly aquainted example of irreducible ontology, then it seems ontologies strongly emerge macroscopically.

Yes, but we can’t go past “seems” here. This is an example of human thought coming up with what seems to make sense. We might be mistaken, or viewing the issue through some kind of prism (metaphorically).

An issue is that if all our conscious behavior can in principle be simulated and reproduced from models of functioning brains, this emergent ontology seems not only epiphenomenal but also disconnected from our own reports about our own experience which would be due to the brains - this seems incoherent.

Yes, it suggests that there is more to it, wherein the raw experience and the presence of being in that experience is always the primary objective in animal evolution and behaviour. Just how the body achieves this might be more complicated, or novel, than we might at first imagine.

We should remember in this that we are creatures, living entities and we still haven’t got to grips with what it means to be alive. What that entails and enables. For example, it might be necessary for an entity to be alive to become a being. So our hypothetical super advanced AI robot will never be a being until it is alive.

For me, the most logical explanation is that any strong emergence is an illusion (and there is no scientific evidence for it anyway) and we actually have no intuitive, coherent sense of the fundamental "intrinsic" ontology of the universe, partly because of limits on how any intelligent system can work.

Yes, but that is admittedly a partial view. We should remember that we only have a partial understanding of our world, how it is produced, sustained and why it is here and why we are here. We are really in the dark on all these questions.

When I think about this stuff, it always invokes the imagery of the strange loop and munchausen trilemma that really be escaped from.

I would suggest a bit of lateral thinking, as a tonic.

The closest kind of fundamental "intrinsic" ontology I would pick would actually probably be something like informational (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33286288/), but I don't even actually know what that actually really means; the generality of the concept is appealing, that is all.

Yes, that is interesting and monism is being tossed around a bit in there. I don’t see the appeal in going too deep into these analyses. The people doing it are trying to find out something new and this is how they do it. I do similar things in mystical practice, it’s deep complicated and usually doesn’t produce much in the way of results. But it’s also a way of trying to find out something new.

I think Trump backed down, he really didn’t want to start a war between Washington and New York. He would have lost.

Are we by nature hostile or evil? I think no, not by Nature. By history.

We evolved on the African plains, have you watched a nature documentary about what happens there in a natural setting? Everything is competing to eat each other.
Maybe if we had evolved in the forest like the mountain gorilla we would be different.

Yes, I can agree with that. It does still leave quite a large gap to be filled, though. Which is I suppose what this thread is about. The idea that physicalist accounts can go only so far and we should refrain from overstepping their explanatory power.

I’m not anti-physicalism, I just don’t see aspects of being in the same way. I won’t comment on what Wayfarer is saying about this, as I will almost certainly misrepresent him and confuse, or derail the discussion.

You seemed to answer my question about p zombies in your reply to Mww. What I’m saying about p zombies is that the physicalist account of the our world with conscious beings in is identical to what a p zombie universe would be like if described by a neutral observer. The p zombie would be processing information and internal mental states just as described by physicalism when physicalism is describing conscious beings. The only difference is that it would not be conscious. Absolutely everything else would be identical.

I don’t believe it, it’s just my preferred explanation*, I don’t hold beliefs. Yes, I am familiar with the interaction problem.
I don’t see it as dualism, although it conforms largely with what is understood as dualism. I see the problems around dualism as a human construct. So where one thinks of substance dualism, for example, I don’t see these as fundamentally different substances, just differing kinds of substance. I entertain both idealistic and materialist ideologies, both atheistic and religious. I don’t see all these divisions as problematic, but rather divisions we have created. That what people think about and talk about are narratives based on an incomplete understanding of our world, coloured by the human condition.That what we don’t know likely vastly outnumbers what we do know. That we really have no idea about existence, because our narratives are developed solely around what we do in the world we were born into. That the basis of the existence we experience is entirely unknown. This is evidenced in the dilemmas any attempt to determine, or understand what existence, or our existence in this world, we come up against.

Surely given the advances in scientific research and human intellect, we would have discovered, or understood existence by know. But we haven’t, maybe we are no further forward in this understanding than prehistoric people. Are we missing something?

Yes, I see that. It’s so difficult to tease out these positions.

The dualism point, for me depends on where one draws the line. It might be dualism, or monism depending on where one considers the divide between the two to be. So I don’t think this can be resolved, and shouldn’t be used as a means to shut down possibilities.

But the living brain is not a physical thing in space and time.

I think there is a difficulty in depicting the mind in this way. Because the brain is a physical organ. True when it is alive and consciousness it is much more than that, but that organ is present in spacetime.
I would suggest that the brain hosts the mind, so is distinct from the mind, in that the brain is an apparatus performing the biological functions required for a mind to have a presence and interact within a physical body. So it is more appropriate to describe the mind as not a physical thing in space and time.
I hold that there is a mind independent of space and time, but that it is present in the world through being hosted by the brain (and the body). That the nature, or personality of that mind is formed alongside the body in the womb and is the body and mind and is and is not part of the world, simultaneously.

So that we find ourselves with a science and philosophy (in the Western tradition), covering only half of the story, the issue. The other half (the mind etc) has barely been discovered, or recognised.

1) illusionism - this means feelings are not directly physical because they exist exclusively in the mind- a mental construction. It depends only on mental causation (which I've defended). It also accounts for the action of pain-relievers, which mask the pain by interfering the brain's construction of the sensation.

Sounds good, I do think it’s important to bring emotions into this, which involves the endocrine system of hormones and pheromones. So to put it simply, this is a way that the body, as distinct from the brain, is involved in being. Emotions can be triggered in the body ( this can cause a bit confusion because the brain is a physical organ, acting as a gland, independently of the mind), the body informs the being and mind through hormonal activity. Which often works through feelings, urges, emotional states. You only need to look at the oestrogen cycle to see how that occurs.
So yes, feelings exist in the mind, to an extent. But I would suggest also that the mind isn’t consciousness, that consciousness is due to cellular activity (which does include the cells in the brain). But there is something about the being which draws all the instantiations of consciousness (from the cells) into the coherent form of an organism. This multicellular organism somehow acts as a singular conscious being. Who is then enhanced by the computational activity of the mind, hosted by the brain. And that feelings can occur in this instantiation, or singular conscious being, in complex and subtle ways among the complex interactions between the body, the mind and the emotions, acted out within consciousness (as described).

2) Feelings are due to some aspect of the world that has not been identified through science, and may never be. This is open-ended; it could be one or more properties or things.

To an extent, but I see no reason that it may never be, we just haven’t invented the science yet. I come to this from the opposite end of the stick, I work within a complex ideological system of spirit, soul and mind distinct from the physical world, but which interacts with the physical via beings. Beings that are organisms present in the physical sphere. So bridge the gap between the two. There simply isn’t any science working here, there is very little literature and most of it is embedded in religious traditions. So all there is is some ideas worked out by people like me, Wayfarer and a number of others on the forum, and thinkers, or priests within the religious traditions who work with the ideology therein. A ragtag band, of misfits with no overarching scientific, or philosophical grounding (theology accepted). So I can understand the skepticism of people working with a more formal ideology.

Or they promised not to show the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.

Yes there are some intelligent conservatives. They don’t last long in political party’s these days, they get pushed out by the populists. So those intelligent conservatives tend to get tarred with the populist brush.