> Again it sounds like you're demanding from physicalists an explanation of consciousness, and, since they can't give one, you take this as a reason for dismiss

> Again it sounds like you're demanding from physicalists an explanation of consciousness, and, since they can't give one, you take this as a reason for dismissing physicalism…There's like 80 billion neurons which we can't currently inspect at a reasonable granularity It’s not a problem of scale, but a problem of kind. No one can give an account of the exact motions of waves, of the waving of leaves in the wind, etc. Physicists struggle with providing the exact movements and outcomes of even very simple systems, let alone the movements of things at the level of the ocean’s waves or leaves in the wind. But I suspect most of us think that at least there’s the right kinds of things at the lowest level of physics to account for this. We’ve got particles (or waves, or fields, or strings, or whatever it turns out to be) that with just a little imagination we can see, when aggregated together in large quantities, could amount to waves in the ocean, or leaves waving in the wind. There’s the right kinds of activities at the lowest level that are plausibly all that’s needed to make up these large scale phenomena. With consciousness, however, there’s nothing in the lowest level that we can point to and say “maybe piling up more of this would amount to consciousness”. There’s things in the lowest levels of physics we can point to and say “these are movement-like events”, but no analogous “these are consciousness-like events”. No candidate precursors to consciousness, to there being experiences and things that have experiences. What I’m saying is that there isn’t even the beginning of a plausible story here. There is, so far as I can see, nothing at the lowest level that is a plausible starting point for consciousness. Suppose that we have two contending theories, and when we compare their relatives virtues and vices, we find in most ways they’re on a par. However, there’s one, and just one, sticking point — one theory cannot even begin to explain or account for a significant (perhaps the most significant to us) part of reality, while the other has no analogous problem. That gives us reason to prefer the other. I think that an idealism something like George Berkeley’s (but not exactly Berkeley’s) is just such a theory. I think reductive physicalism and a particular idealist theory do about as well as each other on a great many points, except this one. The idealist theory can account for or explain physical stuff, but the physicalist theory can’t even begin to account for or explain mental stuff.