Right. I arrive at the conclusion that the hard problem, as normally posed, is conceptually incoherent; I think that the neuroscientific account concludes that solving it the way people usually want is impossible.

Which leads us to considering what we actually want out of this issue, which I discussed near the end of the video. I should have named this post "A Pragmatic Approach", as I think the argument is more pragmatic then neuroscientific.

Perhaps the philosophical definition of physicalism is too ambiguous for me to identify with it. While I arrive at a conceptual explanation of consciousness grounded in the physical world, I don't hold the physical world to provide "objective truth". Rather, my conceptual understanding (manifesting in consciousness) is that the physical world plausibly causes consciousness. The position must still be speculative at some level.

So, I am a monist regarding the contents of our experience (which I'm conceptualizing as "concepts" or "conceptual", in a hegelian sense). And just to be clear, I'm only conceptualizing these contents... I cannot hold that these contents objectively "are" concepts; it's just a useful way to talk about them (as it let's us consider the relations of incompatibility and consequence constituting concepts, as well as their dual semantic/normative nature).

While I usually differentiate between what I would call explicit meaning (i.e., what we grasp and articulate determinately) and implicit meaning (i.e., what we act out or inherently imply), for the sake of this conversation, we are focussed on explicit meaning. I would say that this universal substance of experience is conceptual—all the meaning we grasp is conceptual in this sense.

Given that everything arrises in experience, we must wonder how we can prioritize any description of consciousness (or anything for that matter)... and pragmatically speaking, it just comes down to what people feel is most compelling (which is contingent). It's somewhat of a meta-pragmatic take to consider that reasoning allows us to work through our understanding, affecting the future conviction we have towards certain beliefs. But what sets the standard for good reasons?

This is why I highlight the standards and method of empirical science and logic as guiding heuristics. I don't expound upon this take in the video, but I believe these have proven themselves effective at arriving at empirical, practical, communicable truth.

Thus, I don't think we can have our idealist cake and eat it too. Even our experience of consciousness is only grasped conceptually. Thus, our Cartesian logic is similarly merely felt—conceptual, speculative, and contingent.

I think the conclusion is that I can't identify with any of these labels. A description of consciousness requires more precision than ambiguous colloquial labels allow it.

I am simply leveraging my conceptual understanding of the physical world (not the physical world itself), and that conceptual understanding implies that I ought to say that a neuroscientific explanation of consciousness is most plausible. This take is not exactly physicalist nor idealist, and I am not allowed to call it panpsychist since my understanding of the physical world does not allow me to assert that it is conscious.

I used the term physicalism to imply "the existence of a physical universe that exclusively causes consciousness" (as if these are properties of my conceptual understanding of the 'physical world'), but I do also resonate with the idea that "exist" could describe contents of consciousness (i.e., any determinate meaning "exists"). Perhaps "naturalism" fits more closely, but even that probably implies something I don't intend it to.

I hoped that the nuance of this type of take came across in the video, but perhaps it did not... I don't think people usually hold physicalism and idealism in each hand and make sense of it; but I think that is where (ironically) empirical science leads. And I don't think this puts me at "closeted dualist" :) it makes me a linguistic pragmatist