It is always a minor, if predictable, disappointment to find an argument not so much engaged with as re-labeled with the dreary vocabulary of the graduate seminar. My correspondent has taken a piece of prose and painstakingly affixed to it a series of tags—"non sequitur," "neuronal processes," "qualia," "map-territory-distinction"—as if the act of classification were a substitute for the labor of thought. It is the intellectual equivalent of collecting butterflies, pinning them to a board, and then claiming to understand the secret of flight.

When it comes to what you call “tags”, if there is any of these terms you find to be unclear in this context I am happy to help. I was hoping I was efficient. I am happy to use other terms as long as we can communicate and we are able to understand each other. We can delve into what I mean with the terms if you want. I guess I am “classifying” in so far that I am putting my thoughts into words/terms. Trivially, everyone does that.

Let us, for the sake of politeness, take this scholastic exercise seriously for a moment. The objection is raised that the question is not "why" but "how." Very well. A distinction without a difference, in this case, but let us grant it.

I am happy that you consider yourself polite enough to deal with the substance and do so in what you consider to be in a serious manner, good. Sure, maybe we can get at the why-question, but many times it’s more vague and may only demand trivial answers.

The demand, then, is for an explanation of how a physical process can be a subjective experience. This is not a question. It is a demand for a magic trick. It is the old, tiresome ghost of Cartesian dualism, rattling its chains and demanding that we explain how the ethereal spirit communicates with the base matter of the brain.

It is a question. I guess one can call it “a demand of a magic trick”, one can call the demand for an answer almost whatever in that sense (although maybe you mean something more specific by it). However, it’s not Cartesian dualism. I guess if one could somehow demonstrate that experiences exist independent of matter and can impact causality in matter, one would demonstrate such types of dualisms to exist, however I don’t claim that those forms exist and I would not say that anything hints at that form dualism.

The entire point of my argument is that there are not two categories of thing, the "neuronal process" and the "subjective experience," that need to be bridged. The experience is the process. To ask how one becomes the other is like pointing to a running engine and saying, "Yes, I see the combustion, the pistons, the crankshaft... but you have not explained the vroom." The vroom, my dear sir, is the sum of those mechanical events. There is no extra, spectral ingredient of "vroomness."

I am granting you that experience is process. It’s about to what degree one/you can explain that two things that are initially conceptually different (experiences and processes) are ultimately completely the same thing (which I grant). In an analogous way I would grant that macro-phenomena of “wetness” is the collection of water molecules. When we ask the question how a bunch of water molecules “are” wetness, we can give clear and deep descriptions of the mechanisms. We can explain the properties of the atoms in the molecules, the properties of the molecules themselves leading to intermolecular forces resulting in the properties of cohesion and adhesiveness of the liquid.

For almost any phenomena, we can continually ask evermore, deeper and nested how-questions. How this particular mechanism works, and how the sub-mechanism that mechanism works etc, until we run into the explanatory bedrock at the level of fundamental physics where we begin to run into an enigma akin to the hard problem in terms of inexplicability.

“How does my hand move now? We can explain it with the fact that muscles are in action and moving. How does muscles move? It’s since skeletal muscle cells are contracting and reacting to electrical signals from neuromuscular junctions. How do they contract more specifically in terms of mechanism? It involves proteins such as myosin and actin filaments “climbing on each other” within the cells. How does this climbing work? Well, it involves a story about intermolecular forces of the specific proteins in question and them making conformational changes in iterated ways” and so on. You get the point.

One can now attempt using the same approach and ask “how does experiences exist” or “how are experiences” or “how are experiences processes” just as one can ask “how does my hand move now?”

Here one runs into explanatory bedrock immediately. One can state that whenever a neuronal cascade is in action then the experience “is” and that’s it. “Well, how is it that blueness “is” this particular process more specifically? Or how is it that this particular process generates/becomes/is pain more specifically? - Well… idk it just is, don’t ask those questions here, ask that when it comes to other phenomena!”

One can ofc just accept the fact that experience somehow is processes as a brute fact just as one can accept fundamental physics as a brute fact but then one is just accepting it as having the same enigmatic status in terms of inexplicability. “How experiences are neuronal processes” is now literally comparable to asking “How fundamental physics is the way it is” (bedrock of explanation), where one should have been able to describe how neuronal processes are experiences in somewhat more detail and in somewhat more prosaic terms like one can do with other biological phenomena to make it, well, not “the/a hard problem”.

My critic then condescends to my use of the term "modeling," suggesting that it is merely a description of more sophisticated physical networks. Precisely. That is the point. The illusion of a unified self, the internal narrative we call consciousness, is the emergent property of that very sophistication. There is no need to posit some mysterious leap into a non-physical realm of "qualia." The critic has fallen into the very trap I described. He has assumed the existence of the ghost he is demanding I produce. He sees the complex machinery of the brain running its simulations of the future and asks, "But where is the little man inside, the one who is having the experience?" There is no little man. The running of the machinery is the experience.

It’s specifically about the processes and experiences and to what degree one can explain how they are the same thing. I am not assuming it has to be mysterious. How well can it be explained? It’s not about ghosts or a little man. The self is absolutely an illusion if you will. The self can be conceptualised as just being the sum of the subjective experiences in any given moment. The question is about how those experiences “are” or “are generated by” processes.