I didn't mean to imply anything about my beliefs. I have a more general atheoretic attitude towards it. My belief could be formalized "For any person with a s

I didn't mean to imply anything about my beliefs. I have a more general atheoretic attitude towards it. My belief could be formalized "For any person with a set of beliefs about consciousness, their beliefs are wrong, and they are not justified in holding them." You said: "I do reject the idea that conscienceless is anything more than the byproduct of the physical process of the brain, of course, I don't think that's what you're implying, I hope." This is exactly like saying: "I reject the idea that final digits of pi is anything more than the byproduct of the physical processes in my computer's calculator program" I don't think actually I implied not-physicalism, but I would be happy to endorse it. The idea that consciousness is illusory relates to high functioning autism in people who develop the theories in a complicated way. Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, had a very autistic picture theory of language that gave way to a non-autistic theory as he got older. For very intelligent people who are blind to other minds, studying consciousness is very important, because, to them, it seems like the most logical way to understand people. I don't mean this as criticism of intelligent people with autism. But, relying on these people to understand consciousness is like relying on a colorblind person who has mastered scientific and mathematical models of analyzing wavelengths of light to explain color as an artist experiences it.