I did not mean qualia, I knew qualia. I meant that my experience is not matter. Matter is matter and charges are charges, my experience right now is neither. Your perception, the act of you experiencing life right now is not matter.
> We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on.
Indeed all computation and input collection and such happen in the brain. I just don't understand how I can experience anything if I'm composed only of matter. How come there happens to be a mind? Indeed the electrochemical charges from visual receptors in the eye will be transmitted and computed and memory and dopamine and all the neurons will fire regardless of whether I'm only matter or not. But how can the experiencing consciousness, 'me' arise from matter?
> only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems
This is what I'm talking about, only that I don't see why simulations are not physical systems.
> yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be?
It's nonsensical and unscientific to completely rule out the possibility that we can be something else as well, especially when we can't study it directly, like in the example of soul.
Simulations are physical systems just as much as running a "Hello World" program on your computer is a physical system: somewhere some transistors flip, but they are not relevant for the level of description we are interested when running the program, the program output, as simple or complex as it could be. Somewhere in the brain some molecules do "stuff", as a result of the "stuff" the brain sustains one agent, or more [1]. How exactly, in an engineering sense, the agent is constructed is yet to be discovered, hopefully we are only a few years, a few decades, away from building synthetic agents.
Sure, we have about 2,700 years of tradition speaking of souls (considering the major religions: Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism). Where did those 2,700 years got us? Has any religion been able to build a conscious agent starting from basic materials (whatever they consider basic, pixie dust if they will)? Have all this years speaking of souls managed to achieve something meaningful, even as a side effect, that actually improves the quality of life? I'm talking hay [2], indoor plumbing, hook-and-loop fasteners, ibuprofen, GPS, voltmeters, extreme ultraviolet lithography, things that you and I can use and rely on daily. I have read pretty much all the major texts of the major traditions, from Mahābhārata to Summa Theologiae, call it intellectual curiosity. If not for the "bragging rights" to say that I know what filioque or bodhipakkhiyādhammā means, I would regret it, wasted time and pointless eye strain. So no, it's not nonsensical and unscientific to rule out a not even hypothesis such as the "soul" after 2,700+ years without any kind of results and absolute incompatibility with the way we actually interact with the world, scientifically or not: photons, atoms, electromagnetic fields and the like.
> We looked insanely deep into the brain [4], there is no magic going on.
Indeed all computation and input collection and such happen in the brain. I just don't understand how I can experience anything if I'm composed only of matter. How come there happens to be a mind? Indeed the electrochemical charges from visual receptors in the eye will be transmitted and computed and memory and dopamine and all the neurons will fire regardless of whether I'm only matter or not. But how can the experiencing consciousness, 'me' arise from matter?
> only a simulation can be conscious, not physical systems
This is what I'm talking about, only that I don't see why simulations are not physical systems.
> yes, you are electrochemical charges, we all are, what else could we be?
It's nonsensical and unscientific to completely rule out the possibility that we can be something else as well, especially when we can't study it directly, like in the example of soul.