Neil Rickert was at it again attempting to ‘explain consciousness’ over at PS at the imperative-phrased invitation of Joshua Swamidass to: “Tell me how you think consciousness evolved.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/
Neil had written this: “What it really boils down to, is that there is no such thing as metaphysical truth. There is only conventional truth. And different social groups will disagree over their social conventions.”
TSZ poster BruceS answered Neil’s challenge and addressed part of its background assumptions: “Another fan of Rorty-style pragmatism… Seems to be a cult among TSZ moderators.” So perhaps this is worth discussing here as well (though obviously the lone religious theist moderator at TSZ Mung was forgotten in BruceS’s comment).
I too reject the notion that “there is only conventional truth,” a view, however, that this site’s founder Elizabeth Liddle also seemed to hold. In the fields I have studied, this is a view held largely by social constructivists, which is often turned into a kind of ‘sociologism’ – the ideology that holds all things can be explained by appeal to societies or groups alone. This view, however, unfortunately comes at the cost of other ‘truths’.
Thus, I respectfully disagree with Neil and believe that the claim “there is no such thing as metaphysical truth” is just his own convenient fiction. It would seem that he has taken a massive detour away from ‘metaphysical truth’ and is now trying to ‘explain’ something that cannot actually be explained. Additionally, it appears that this detour has had to do largely with an attempt to create a ‘religion substitute,’ along the lines of Daniel Dennett’s evolutionistic-atheist worldview.
Rickert tells: “I was a deeply committed Christian for part of my life. But I came to doubt that, long before I started to study human cognition.” https://discourse.peacefulscience.org/t/rickerts-ideas-on-consciousness/3684/4 It thus seems that it was instead a reaction against YECism that had an important role in Neil leaving whatever Christian community he had been ‘deeply committed’ to, prior to taking up a pastime study of human cognition. If not for YECists, he might still believe in metaphysical truth & a Creator who loves us – all people – even Neil.
Rickert writes about his, “study of consciousness, where I have to look at how people make conscious assessments of what is true.” He admits that he holds “a view which many people – perhaps most people – will see as wrong. That’s why it is difficult to explain consciousness.” Yet, this makes the mistake of suggesting that it is merely other peoples’ fault why he can’t ‘explain consciousness,’ rather than taking responsibility for his inability or lack of success to convince others about how ‘consciousness evolved’ (implied: naturalistically, without need, use or role for a supernatural Creator) on himself. Maybe ‘consciousness’ simply can’t be ‘explained’ and hence there is little value in trying to do so (unless or even if one is trained as a PhD in the field and has made it their life’s passion). Otherwise, I don’t understand the ‘that’s why’ implied in Neil’s assessment of the professed difficulty of ‘explaining consciousness.’
I find the rejection of YECism dilemma fascinating and surely relevant for the TSZ community, most of whom reject YECism. It is not one commonly faced where I grew up, so please excuse if my questions come across as ignorant or insensitive. However, I did personally face and had to grapple with the ideology of YECism as told to me by a person who I highly respect still to this day and who has become a very successful practitioner in his chosen field of study & expertise (non-academic), which has nothing to do with the age of the earth. I even thought YECism had some glimpse of merit for a time, before realising that what had to be ignored and discounted in order to remain a YECist displayed errors too voluminous to seriously entertain.
Does rejection of YECism lead some people into a crisis of faith? How do we face or encounter YECists as still respectable and worthy human beings even though we wholeheartedly disagree with the ideology that they have embraced (as part of their consciousness)? I believe Neil is right to wonder about these things. And I believe it would be wrong to act unjustly towards or to treat people in an inhumane way simply because they hold an ideology that is damaging usually to no one other than themselves and their local religious community, as if I held any power as ultimate judge over the care for their souls by demanding that they turn away from ideological YECism.
“We can, of course, sit back smugly knowing that we are right and that the YECs are wrong. But, at the same time, the YECs can sit back smugly knowing that they are right and that we are wrong.” … “People do not like explanations of what they already take for granted. They don’t believe that an explanation is needed, since they already take it for granted. And, if pointing out that what they take for granted depends, in part, on social conventions, then they are likely to see that as questioning what they take for granted. / This is why it is hard to explain consciousness.” – Neil Rickert https://nwrickert.wordpress.com/2019/02/21/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness/
My concern with the social constructivist and ‘social convention’ approach to ‘truth’ is that it places the utmost difficulty on the doorsteps of other people, rather than accepting responsibility on one’s own doorstep by insisting that one *can* ‘explain consciousness.’ It is surely unfortunate, however, because Neil may not have had to face this dilemma in a different Christian community, given that YECists constitute a rather large minority view among Christians worldwide (despite what R. Byers says). Indeed, most Christians don’t get upset with each other about ‘evolution’ or ‘consciousness’ as they go about their regular lives of prayer and worship and aren’t upset by it in their beliefs or relationships with others at their local churches.
Another option, one that Rickert might like to consider, is that consciousness is something that can’t actually be explained, certainly not ‘scientifically’. It may even be a God-given reflection of human beings as ‘ensouled’ creatures. Consciousness may thus simply be always something greater than what can be grasped by highly limited, finite human minds, rather than a temptation toward trying to become god-like in our self-understanding; a topic not meant for full comprehension. At some point, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bahai’s and others must simply admit we don’t have all of the answers and consciousness, as well as some ‘metaphysical truths,’ are surely strong candidates for such an admission.
Leaving the Church because one can’t understand/explain why YECists couldn’t change their minds when faced with a huge amount of ‘strictly scientific’ evidence for an ‘old earth’ may indeed be felt by some as a very difficult but necessary situation to face. It is not one that perplexes me and I have never faced any pressure from a religious person inside a ‘house of worship’ to adopt their hypothesis about the age of the Earth. I have been calmly told about their views, but never with insistence. There is help, however, for those who have experienced pressure or insistence. Indeed, this is precisely what the BioLogos Foundation was built to encounter, as it is made up largely of former YECists who didn’t turn away from religious faith but found a way to embrace theology without accepting YECism, i.e. while rejecting YECist ideology.
Please consider this as an attempt at understanding and simply offering an answer to Rickert’s dilemma, rather than at dictating any particular solution to the problem. As it involves his own personal history that he has volunteered on the internet on this extremely sensitive topic, I certainly do not wish to put any words in Neil’s mouth or to misrepresent him or his view. I do not wish to ‘out’ his thoughts or character about anything he wishes to keep private. Please do forgive my inability to ‘explain’ these things more clearly, as I’m just trying to understand what if any link there might be between rejecting ‘metaphysical truth,’ trying to ‘explain consciousness’ and leaving a church due to what might appear as YECist fanaticism and refusal to accept scientific knowledge about the Earth, creatures and people on it.
petrushka,
I’m still interested in your response to this:
I’m not attempting to leave reality out. However, our ability to reference reality depends on conventions. Leave out the social conventions, and you are left with a subjective reality. Leave out your private internal “conventions” (or whatever the private equivalent of “convention” should be called), and you are left with no reality at all — except perhaps what William James called “a blooming buzzing confusion”.
Neil,
The Tunguska event depended on solar system physics, not on human conventions. Yet your claim is that all truth is conventional:
If a “social group” adopts the convention that the Tunguska event never happened, then their convention is not a “conventional truth” — it’s a conventional falsehood.
As so often happens, you manage to completely miss the point.
I am not suggesting someone should or would adopt the convention “the Tunguska event never happened”. Rather, I am saying that our ability to talk about or know about the Tunguska event already depends on many social conventions.
Bruce,
Internalism doesn’t prevent language from being tied scientifically to concepts; far from it.
In fact, I’ve already mentioned a scenario — the fluency test — in which your history-based externalism would actually impede the establishment of a such a connection, whereas internalism wouldn’t.
Suppose Swampman is zapped into existence, and his physically identical non-Swampman counterpart is struck by the same lightning bolt. They stumble out of the swamp, dazed and singed.
They are accosted by a pair of scientists who wish to study the effects of lightning strikes on verbal competence. The scientists administer an extensive battery of English-language fluency tests to the two, each of whom passes the tests with an outstanding score.
The first scientist, a history-based externalist, says “Well, that was a bust. We have no idea whether either of these guys understands English. After all, we don’t know their histories.” The second scientist looks askance at his colleague and says “What are you talking about? They both passed our tests with flying colors. Of course they understand English.”
Neil,
I didn’t say you were.
What you are claiming is that all truth is conventional truth, and that’s just goofy.
That the Tunguska event happened, in reality, is independent of human convention.
Suppose the UN General Assembly unanimously passes a resolution stating that the Tunguska event never happened, and every person on the planet endorses it. It will still be true that the Tunguska event happened.
The UN resolution will contain a conventional falsehood, not a conventional truth.
I didn’t refer to hemispheres. But let me rephrase and say half (in broad terms) the brain’s activity is nonverbal.
Out for the day but this BBC video might be of interest.
These are the same debates that KN and I had about functional versus historical ways to understand norms for mental representations. The Piccinini paper I mentioned gives a nice summary of the positions there.
I’m not interested in pursuing the logical nuances of the twin earth and swampman thought experiments, since they have nothing to do with science. I prefer my philosophy to be grounded in good science.
You are right to link the issue to scientific practice. That is what the Piccinini paper I mentioned earlier and the Shea book try to do.
I should confess one thing: I have mentioned approvingly the linguists Jackendoff and Evans. To the extent that these two can be slotted into the traditional philosophical categories, I think they are best called internalists, especially about language itself but also about meaning in language. That is why I did a goal post move into concepts; those two authors are less easily classified when it comes to concepts.
ETA: In particular, I agree with you when you say
It’s concepts that need externalism of a sort to provide norms. Or at least so says teleosemantics. Here I am taking the standard view that concepts are a type of mental representation (but as noted in 1.4 of this link, that does not exclude other ways of understanding them)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/#OntCon.
Of course I agree with you. I was just trying to describe a standard interpretation of SSR; the one preferred by some post modernists. I’m not saying I agreed with the interpretation.
I’t been a while since I read his article, but I recall Kitcher having a more nuanced but still appreciative understanding of Kuhn’s major contributions to philosophy and sociology of science.
Been there, done that with you (we had spirited exchanged on physicalism as supervening on the current state of the universe, where “current” is taken as in the reference frame of the mental representation process under consideration, and which would therefore include the physics-type of information from past events in the past light cone of the events in that process.)
You are welcome to have another go at it, but I won’t be involved this time around.
Ironically, the causal history approach is offered by materialist philosophers as a way of naturalisting norms for representation — that is, as a counter to those non-materialist philosophers saying such norms lie outside the scope of science!
My problem with this is it ties concepts to language use. That’s the wrong way around for me.
I prefer understanding concepts in an evolutionary context, that is understanding how animals have concepts, likely as mental representations underlying dispositions to action.
Then proceed to understanding how human language use enriches our repertoire of concepts. The Evans book I mentioned (“Crucible of Language”) takes a go at that starting from the view that concepts we inherit from evolutionary analysis are perception-based, and then using cognitive linguistics to explore how language extends the possibilities for concepts in human meaning, eg by adding abstractions, like redness as an abstract property being added to red pre se as perception-based concept.
I hope that PP can be used to understand at least the perception-based concepts, but Evans does not go that way. He uses instead Barselou’s work on perception and concepts.
Another interesting aspect of cognitive linguistics is the theory that even abstract concepts are in part embodied, eg as in Lakoff’s work. This has neuroscientific evidence — the same brain areas are activated for thinking about abstract concepts as in the control of the body actions they can be understood as relating to.
Do you agree that science can make progress in the sense that a later theory is progress over an earlier one when the later theory is able to successfully predict a wider set of phenomena than the earlier one, while still including all the phenomena covered by the earlier one? GR versus Newtonian gravity would be one example.
I do agree it is a separate step from that notion of scientific progress to the notion that the reason science makes progress is because theories are doing a better job of representing and referring to structures (or maybe entities) of reality. I think that is where you and I part company.
There is the further view that we can characterize theories as “converging” to a limit theory, where this theory limit is true in the Peircean sense of truth meaning indefeasible by further scientific inquiry.
Here I am focusing on the word ‘converging’ which has a mathematical limit connotation for me and for you as well I suspect. There is a Jay Rosenberg paper that tries to justify that mathematical sense; I believe KN first mentioned it and we had an exchange on it some time ago. I’m not interesting in going there again; I just want to mention that is could be seen s involved since ‘converging’ has been used in this context.
(The paper is “Comparing the Incommensurable: Another Look at Convergent Realism”)
I guess one difference between us & what makes that seem weird to you is that I’m a human being too, not just a specialized academic quack, or a philosophistic ethno-religious apostate who clings to so many contradictory ideologies in their ‘secular-agnostic’ worldview that they appear proudly & profoundly confused. Why would experiencing that spiritual vacuum, KN, require empirical support? Even you may have such a vacuum in your ‘selfless’ heart though admitting that would require more humility & wisdom than you usually display here as you celebrate the worship of Science above ‘mere theology’.
I said above that considering scientific practice is important. Let me expand on that.
Consider the heart.
One could ask how the heart functions to pump blood. Science would answer this by providing the mechanism by which the heart implements blood pumping. The answer would only consider current causes, not causal history.
Now consider the question of why the function of the heart is to pump blood, rather than to make thumping noises. That is a norms question since it asks why pumping is the correct function and making thumping noises is not. One way for the scientists to answer is natural selection; that is, pumping blood contributed to the fitness of ancestors of the organism, whereas making thumping noises does not. That answer involves causal history*.
ETA: Further, scientists will confidently assert that that causal history exists, even if they may not be able to detail it step-by-step.
In general, one can distinguish how versus why questions. The how questions usually involve only current causes. Why questions can involve causal history.
——————————–
* I am aware that there are other scientific ways to answer the why question, like perspectivalism or looking to the current interests of the organism to maintain homeostasis, but they have issues, I think.
Again, not at all relevant.
Yes, I mostly agree with that. But the newer theory might not do as well for some predictions. Newtonian gravity still works better than GR for earth bound phenomena.
Right. And I see that as nonsense, based on a misunderstanding of the nature of science. Perhaps I should add that it is a misunderstanding that you would need to overcome before you could hope to understand consciousness.
But I am also human, and so is KN. You seem to hint otherwise, which is a really creepy unchristian thing for you to suggest.
Physics converges on formulae and equations that predict to more decimal places, under more extreme conditions, but I don’t see that as converging on explanations. Relativity and quantum theory are certainly great predictors, but explain nothing.
Perhaps the question of when Joe was born is less interesting than the question of who would have been born if Joe’s parents had been interrupted by a knock on the door at a critical moment.
Perhaps that seems flippant, but there’s the related question of whether we would even be here to ask the question if a certain asteroid’s orbit had crossed earth’s path thirty minutes later.
I don’t doubt that facts are facts, and factual assertions can be true or false. But really interesting assertions are undecidable. Even more so if they are about the future.
Gregory has never been deterred from dehumanizing those who are committed to a purely secular faith.
Has he taken the measure of that hollow spot?
petrushka, earlier:
petrushka, now:
Then why avoid words like “true”, “false”, “right”, and “wrong”, and why do you think it leads to increased precision?
I’ve already given an example of how avoiding “true” and replacing it with “useful” makes communication less, not more, precise:
keiths:
Neil:
Entirely relevant. You claimed that all truth is conventional truth:
My example shows why your claim is wrong. Convention can’t change a denial of Tunguska into a truth, or an affirmation of Tunguska into a falsehood. Not even if the convention is agreed upon by the entire world.
I think you are using “works” only in the sense that GR is too cumbersome for earth-bound use, not that it is would yield inaccurate predictions. I think GR has been confirmed eg by clocks in airplanes versus on the ground, so in that sense it does provide better predictions for earthbound use than Newtonian. GPS uses GR (inc SR) time corrections too, I believe.
I am curious as to what exactly that “misunderstanding” is.
ETA: In talking about theories progressing to a true theory, I have tried to define a true theory so that being true has nothing to do with saying something about reality, but only says that a theory is true if no further progress is possible from it (ie indefeasible by further inquiry).
I don’t know Gregory as a person, but the posts read as if written by someone who has spent a lot of time with a thesaurus and Don Rickles.
(BruceS was responding to my comment about convergent realism).
I will use an analogy.
We take pictures with a camera. The earliest form of taking pictures was presumably hand drawing. But the technology has improved.
It is reasonable to expect our pictures to converge to “the one true picture” of whatever part of the world we are picturing. It is absurd to expect the cameras to converge to the one true camera.
Scientific theories like cameras. The data that we get while using those theories is like a picture. Scientific theories are tool sets; they are not descriptions.
OK thanks. I agree that scientific realism is a step beyond instrumentalism, which I think is the appropriate term in philosophy for your ideas..
FWIW, I was trying to avoid the word ‘converge’ and concentrate on progressing, which I think can be taken to mean scientific theories change when they give us a better tool set. That would not contract instrumentalism..
Then scientific realism goes beyond that to try to give an IBE of why they give us a better and better tool set.
I tend to look at progress a bit differently.
Going from a 1 megapixel camera to a 10 megapixel camera is progress, even if the two cameras use completely different technologies. Roughly speaking, I want to measure progress in terms of how finely we slice and dice the world.
That sees progress in terms of reality, rather than in terms of the particular tool set.
Right, sorry, I don’t know where that “tool set” phrase came from. I should have stuck with what I said first: progress means the later theory predicts a superset of the earlier theory’s predictions.
That’s enough for me for this round.
The standard objection to instrumentalism is that it makes scientific progress look like a miracle or at any rate unexplainable.
Neil,
A 10 megapixel camera with a terrible lens isn’t an improvement over a 1 megapixel camera with an excellent lens, and a fine-grained theory that’s falsified by observations isn’t an improvement over a coarser-grained but accurate theory.
Neil, to Bruce:
Where did you get that idea?
Bruce,
That’s an odd scruple, since you were willing to discuss them at length in our earlier conversation. Thought experiments are extremely useful, which is why every philosopher worth his or her salt will be familiar with the classic ones, including Swampman, Twin Earth, the ship of Theseus, Searle’s Chinese Room, Wittgenstein’s “beetle in a box”, and so on.
Good philosophy shouldn’t conflict with good science, but that hardly requires us to avoid thought experiments like Swampman and Twin Earth.
I was responding to this statement of yours…
…by pointing out that:
There are also philosophical issues based on the nature of theories themselves:
– are theories purely syntactic under instrumentalism and if so does that reflect scientific practice;
– can one in principal remove theoretical terms from theories in favor or observational terms only (as is required by instrumentalism)
– does the instrumentalist view of theories leave them rich enough to account for scientific practice, such as the need for counterfactuals.
But I find that a challenge with Neil and others who post here because as best as I can see he has not engaged with modern philosophical discussion of these ideas so there is not that starting place to understand the details of his ideas.
So I doubt that philosophical instrumentalism fully captures his views. For example, I have never really understood his ideas of “measuring reality”.
So for now I decided not to pursue why science could not build an instrumentalist theory of consciousness, for example by predicting verbal behavior to experimentally-controlled stimuli from only measurements of body/brain neural states/processes. If instrumentalism is good enough for the other sciences, why not for consciousness studies?
Why not, indeed? We’re certainly not going to get far working out how thinking works just by thinking about it.
Just to complete my thought: many might argue that such an instrumentalist view amounts only to giving the correlations between brain/body state and reports of subjective experiences. It does not fully explain the nature of first-person experience.
But that concern does not seem to be available to someone who is a pure instrumentalist about all sciences.
BruceS,
*googles “instrumentalism – yup, that’s me”
I’m sure I said before I think it’s unexplainable – that the processes that result in conscious thought in humans can be understood by humans. We’re a long way from that goal and should look for easier ones. There are the processes that resulted in the evolution of the adaptations needed for speech production and reception and its dominance in human thought processes, the evolution of language in humans looked at comparatively with other species …
If they are, then I am not an instrumentalist. That is to say, I do not see theories as purely syntactic.
I’m skeptical of the distinction between theoretical terms an observational terms.
The proper starting place is science, not philosophy. Or, if you prefer, the proper starting place is philosophy as done by scientists — even though that’s often a mess.
Sigh! Where to start.
The brain is the instrument. And if there are, say 7 billion people on earth, then there are 7 billion instruments, all of them different.
The kind of theory of consciousness that Chalmers wants, would require that we all have identical brains. And that would probably make us all mindless mechanical robots. But we all have different brains. There could not be a “one size fits all” kind of theory. So, instead, we need to study principles of instrumentation, though that would not be my way of putting it.
What problems does a “brain” need to solve? How can a “brain” go about solving those problems? I put “brain” in quotes there, because the emphasis is on the problems, not on the specifics of the solution. The emphasis is the principles of solving the problems, and whether or not neurons are useful for that is beside the point of what needs to be studied.
I thought this comment by a Guardian correspondent was rather appropriate for this thread:
One of the great insights of Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalysts was that none of us are in full conscious command of ourselves. We have multiple competing urges and at any moment, any one of them might pull us in one direction or another. What we think of as our conscious “self” is actually more like an internal narrator, trying to make sense of these squirming appetites after the event, convincing herself she is leading the meeting, whereas in fact it’s more like she’s taking the minutes. But the only thing that really gives your identity meaning and coherence – that makes you now that same person as you when you were five years old – is this narrative. It’s what turns a series of random events into a meaningful story. You.
I think what he’s trying to say is something like all language depends on conventions, truths are always in languages, and Kuhn was right about scientific theories.
Btw, speaking of Kuhn, I’d like to see this gossipy thing: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/was-thomas-kuhn-evil/
Yes, except I would change that to “Kuhn was roughly right …”
What do you mean there — that you want a thread on this? Or that you want to see the movie?
Neil Rickert,
I want to see the movie.
Bruce,
And much of what he has engaged with, he’s misunderstood.
Take this bizarre claim, for example:
Fair enough. But I don’t think I’ll bother.
I’m assuming everyone here is a human being; that there aren’t any bots in action. What I wrote is not dehumanising in the slightest, as those with ears could easily hear. It was simply pointing out the folly of the resident philosophist at TSZ, who also promotes agnosticism, naturalism, Marxism & other such apostate ideologies, while atheists & agnostics oftentimes pat him on the back here for how profound & erudite his words here sound to them, without God living in his heart.
Why would one even try to seek “empirical support” for Pascal’s expression: “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every person, and it can never be filled by any created thing”? To suggest one needs “empirical support” for this simply reveals the kind of scientistic worldview KN holds, that’s all. Calling it ‘dehumanising’ for pointing that out makes no sense. But one can’t really speak constructively about this at TSZ because of the religious numbness and neutering of many of the people here along with the anti-religious anger & arrogance of a few.
Neil said he left his ‘committed’ Christian worldview, it appeared to me for reasons that involve him rejecting YECists & their ‘conventional truth.’ Iow, before trying to ‘explain consciousness’ with a strictly naturalistic view that ‘consciousness evolved’, i.e. without any divine Mind possible, Neil Rickert became an apostate ex-Christian. The possible link of his apostasy with YECism was all I was interested in seeing if Neil would discuss further, which he didn’t. The rest of the thread constitutes atheist/agnostic indulgences.
Since Neil tells that his apostasy has nothing to do with YECists or YECism, & that it pre-dated his turn to human cognition and an attempt to naturalistically ‘explain consciousness,’ perhaps he will say what started it. Reducing the discussion of religious belief or unbelief to mere ‘consciousness’ starts to sound deterministic quite soon, though perhaps Neil would accept that he had at least some personal choice in the matter.
Bruce:
Alan:
As if the two poles were “instrumentalism” and “just thinking about stuff”.
You are not using ‘instrument’ in the same way that I was using ‘instrumentalist’, since I was talking about theories, not brains.
Last I looked Chalmers wanted to extend physics to add panpsychism. Tononi/Koch IIT is panpsychic, but not in Chalmers way. Little to no scientific or philosophical work buys into Chalmers ideas on how the science of consciousness should work.
I am not sure how (or if) you infer “identical brains” are needed for a science of consciousness. We don’t all have identical genomes, but that does not stop science. It does mean we have to understand individual genomes before applying the general theory. Same will be the case for some future theory of consciousness, I suspect.
Yes studying action is a key part of the scientific work. I used ‘brain/body’ neural events/processes above to allude to that. But science also studies implementation mechanisms, which I suspect for consciousness will involve the biochemical dynamics of networks of neurons (and maybe other cells). It will also likely need successors of MRI machines which can monitor neural systems in normal action, and not just prone and thinking about action.
The position in your post is consistent with your behaviorism.
Instrumentalists think science can tell us nothing about reality; it only tells us about the outcomes of experiments. So there are no Higgs Bosons; the term “Higgs Boson” is just a useful short form to use in predicting the outcomes of certain collider experiments.
Well, okay, I was too cryptic. A brain implements a theory of the world (really, a theory of everything, but physicists means something different by that expression).
Again, I was too cryptic. The Chalmers “hard problem” only makes sense if all brains implement pretty much the same theory of the world. Otherwise brains implement incommensurable theories, and any solution to the hard problem would have be specific to an individual brain. There couldn’t be a “one size fits all” kind of solution.
I don’t see your argument. To me, the science is about how the brain/body implements a theory. Your seem to be claiming that even to study at that level of generality is impossible.
But successes in current, very primitive neuroscience argue otherwise, eg in being to predict what someone will say based on MRI analysis or in finding common brain patterns and areas associated with action (including verbal action). (Caveat: going by memory for those examples).
But you cannot implement a theory if you don’t have a theory.
Each brain has to develop its own theory. And it is implausible that two distinct brains would develop the identical theory.