That would only be possible if qualia has no causation. In the case where our experiences have real effects they cannot be fully described by a Turing architecture.

How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that I'm not aware of that settles this?

You are missing a dimension here by the way. Even if we could find a physical location of the brain that lights up when the color red is experienced, that doesn't have any explanatory power for the nature of subjective experience. How can it be possible to experience being a brain, being a brain itself? Not just observing another brain and correlating brain activity with reported experiences.

Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. You started with sensory experience and perception, and built models of how your brain works on top of that, not the other way around.

> How are you certain? Has someone published a paper that I'm not aware of that settles this?

That's kinda the point. I'm not certain at all, but given the available information, it is the simplest explanation.

> How can it be possible to experience being a brain, being a brain itself?

I'm not really sure what you're asking here. A clock can tell time, but if it was _like something_ to be a clock, it would feel like knowing what time it is, it would not (and pretty much couldn't) involve awareness of all that goes into producing that feeling (because then you'd need a mechanism for awareness of that, and then a mechanism for awareness of that mechanism, and etc). The difference with the brain is that we're pretty sure it is _like something_ to be a brain in a body, and we also know it doesn't include perfect awareness of what goes into producing that feeling. So when you ask 'how can it be possible to experience being a brain, being a brain itself' I would say that it isn't? because your awareness is limited to the qualia that bubbles up out of the mechanics in the brain, and your experience of being a brain is similar in fidelity to the clock's experience of being able to tell the time.

> Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world. You started with sensory experience and perception, and built models of how your brain works on top of that, not the other way around.

This is just solipsism. Sure, it is entirely possible all of the experiences and perceptions I've experienced have misled me into thinking that the brain is all there is, but that seems kind of contrived? I'm just as confused as you about why we aren't all p-zombies, but, well... the history of all knowledge has basically been "yeah it turns out to just be physics", so my guess is that qualia is also just physics.

It's not solipsism. The idea that "you" exist is just as conceptual as physics - there is no solipsism without "you". And the idea that it "turns out to just be physics" is a concept rather than reality. It's a thought of yours, not ground truth. And labeling this "solipsism" is just falling into that trap once again. It's really a miasma of perception in the form light and shadow and color and sound and pressure and heat (which are crude conceptual labels themselves for actual experience), and thoughts emerge in this cloud of sensation, also as independent phenomena in themselves. This subjective experience is first and primary. Any structure you build on top of it is conceptual and not ground truth.

It's not solipsism or contrived, quite the opposite. It's profound. Whether we like the fact or not, or that it's not convenient to your desire to have a mathematical formulation of the world, doesn't make it any less true. To downgrade the most direct experience of reality and give primacy to the conceptual is to confuse the map with the territory.

> Experience and consciousness are axiomatic and precede theory about the physical world.

Actually, they seem unnecessary to any theory about the physical world. They likely don't exist, but if they do, it's just bad psychology that wasn't quite debilitating enough for evolutionary pressure to weed them out.

I don't even think I'm conscious myself in the way you imagine yourself to be. "Consciousness" probably belongs in poetry, it definitely doesn't belong in philosophy and that goes double for real science.

So just ignore first hand experience as a phenomenon at all? That seems like a huge thing to pull the wool over.

It absolutely belongs in philosophy, and is one of the core topics in any philosophy program, and I'm not talking about "real science", which is precisely why I said that physics doesn't explain it.

There's nothing to ignore. Some evolved monkeys have vivid imagination, which they mistake for reality. Phenomenon noted, time to move on to important things.

Are you speaking as the representative of "reality"? Are you somehow the embodiment of "science"? Is it possible to experience and reason about reality without going through the eyes of an "evolved monkey"? You are speaking as if you are disembodied and floating around in the ether experiencing reality directly. It's so close to you that you don't even notice that you exist, and you are the only window you have to reality. There isn't any reality that you can be aware of outside of your own subjective perception, despite you "vivid imagination". You are confused if you think "reality" and "your model of reality" are two different things.

> Already you've sneaked in the presupposition that consciousness is only a result of your brain activity.

What else could it be? The interesting question is how and why.

> Have you ever not eaten for two days? Or not slept for more than 24 hours? Have you ever had an itch under a cast that you couldn't itch, and been constantly distracted by it?

Sure, I've done all of those things, but they all cause physical changes in the brain. These physical changes then directly affect your qualia-type experience of reality.

Have you read "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel? It's readily available online as a pdf. It discusses the hard problem of consciousness and the mind-body problem that I only briefly and poorly hinted at with my earlier questions. Reductionism doesn't work for consciousness. At all.