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> > > > He claims the materialist position is that conscious activity is directly correlated to the amount of neural activity. I don't think any actually says or believes that, so it's a strawman.

That's not true, proponents of IIT propose exactly that, or at least heavily hint at it, to them the richness of conscious experience is directly correlated with the amount of "integrated information", and it's not really an unresonable leap to assume more neural activity would lead to more integrated information, so no it's actually not true that physicalists don't believe this.

And again, if you don't believe it to be so you're supposed to show a concrete competing theory, not just gesture vaguely at a potential future theory. You don't really have much to stand on yet you keep pretending like you've basically figured it out.

> Is it really worth arguing with people like Kastrup who referred to the effects of LSD in his dissertation to prove materialism wrong.

And why was his argument faulty in your opinion?

How do you rule out idealism?

> > > > > But what I do know is that all the alternatives I've looked into lead to are incoherent and lead to absurdities.

Materialism is incoherent and leads to absurdities and it's gonna remain that way until you find a coherent mathematical model of consciousness. Put up or shut up, your idea of consciousness is not the tiniest bit less handwavey than the idealist's. You have no clue what's actually going on, and hiding behind the successes of various physical sciences doesn't make your case stronger if you can't even model a single instance of what we call "quale". Even if it is all an illusion you have to show exactly how the illusion is constructed.

You're just begging the question though. You're assuming materialism is correct even though that's exactly what's being contested. Your whole argument hinges on the promise of "we'll figure it out eventually". You barely have even an outline of a coherent theory of consciousness yet you act as if it's essentially solved.

> "Qualia don't exist"

Ok cool. Notice how you can't really claim "the sun does not exist trust me bro" and have people take your seriously, but somehow it's ok to say that about consciousness the way we experience it?

If we are all mistaken about our own consciousness existing or mistaken about what it really is then it's on you to show us the truth, otherwise you're just posturing.

> Yep they have.

They literally haven't though. What are you talking about exactly?

Are you talking about people making correlations between MRI scans and self-reported conscious states? That's nowhere even close to what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a coherent, precise mathematical model of what physical states give rise to what conscious states. No such thing exists.

> Well on one hand you have a model which explains everything we have ever studied, on the other hand you have a model which hasn't made a single useful prediction or insight ever.

It explains everything other than the "we" you mention. There is no mention of conscious experience in any of our physical models. The onus is on you to show how you get from those barren physical models to our rich experiences.

> It seems quite clear to me that the materialist understanding of the world has a much better model.

That's just plain not true. Nobody, materialists or otherwise, has a coherent model to explain even a single quale. IIT is the most coherent proposal so far but even that fails to explain even the most rudimentary quale.

> This just seems weird and backwards. So what if if our conscious experience of the world is the first thing that we experience or know? That doesn't make it fundamental.

What's backwards to me is ignoring the significance of your own conscious experience existing in favor of a model of the physical world that we know for certain is incomplete.

Our base physical models are general relativity and quantum mechanics, and not only do we not know how to reconcile them neither of them leave any room for consciousness so you have to do a lot of handwaving about how consciousness is emergent in complex systems and whatnot.

You don't have the tiniest bit more coherent account of consciousness than an idealist.