[I'll probably soon turn some of what I say below into its own separate thread...}
Anyone ever read David Chalmers' work? Thomas Nagel? Galen Strawson? Or David Skrbina's "MInd That Abides: Panpsychism in the New Millenium"? ( a collection of essays by several relatively "young/new" philosophers in faculty positions throughout mainstream academia).
An adequate philosophical (i.e., analytical philosophy, which is a form of "scientific" philosophy that dominates contemporary western society) understanding of many recent dialectics on the consciousness problem would GREATLY inform and enrich the discussions on this thread. Arguments over "the primacy" of mind or matter like this will continue to go nowhere without such a better understanding.
James Kent, as much as I appreciate his work (albeit with disagreements), seems totally ignorant of contemporary mainstream philosophical discussions and arguments in the vicinity of consciousness. Yeah, Penrose's theory and microtubules seems like bullshit and no one really buys it - but so too is Kent's entire misrepresentation of "consciousness" utter BULLSHIT. The very fact that we have subjective consciousness (e.g., awareness of pain, tastes, smells, etc) from a first person perspective, but only can empirically observe the neurons of another agent without every having to postulate something like consciousness from a third person perspective, underpins some of the classic arguments in modern philosophy FOR why consciousness should be considered ontologically fundamental and irreducible! Kent gets the philosophical dialectic ENTIRELY backwards.
Kent does not know his ass from his elbow when it comes to consciousness and neuroscience, as is true for many mainstream scientists. His article posted above has much to do with neuroscience, and nothing to do with consciousness. As I said above, Kent gets the dialectic backwards. His argument begs all the questions.
When you crack open a person's skull, what do you get? Neurons, chemistry, atoms, and all that shit. You'll never find "sensation of pain", or "experience of red". However, when we introspect from a first person perspective, the latter consciousness experiences is exactly what we find. Physical accounts explain at most structure and dynamics/functions (e.g., the functions of the brain). --> Explaining structure and function does not suffice to explain consciousness (our first person experiences). Another classic argument (briefly): Imagine - a color blind neuroscientist, who knows everything there is to know about physics, optics, and the neurobiology of vision, including the genetic reasons for why he/she is in fact color blind. From all the structural and functional facts about the brain he/she has at her disposal, can she deduce experience of/what it is like to see red? Nope.
Arguments like those and others (of course they are presented succinctly above without much elaboration) at least establish that consciousness is epistemologically distinct from structure and dynamics that physical science gives us. There are thus principled reasons for why neuroscience can only ever give us correlations between neural states and states of consciousness. Mere correlation is certainly not reductive explanation. And further, correlation is not causation, although the brain may "cause" conscious states to emerge somehow, even if consciousness is indeed ontologically distinct.
Frankly, I'm fed up with these confused, ignorant, misinformed, discussions of mind/consciousness/neuroscience/physics, such as Kent's paper here. Read the attachments below - starting with "Nature" - if you wanna get a feel for the field of "the philosophy of the mind".
Lastly: My two cents on the related "primacy" debate (VERY briefly):
Panpsychism or Neutral Monism, in one or another of its many guises, is experiencing somewhat of a revival in western analytic philosophy, endorsed by many mainstream "target-faculty" philosophers in academia. Most modern panpsychist or neutral monist theories integrate mind and matter in a very elegant fashion. Often, consciousness or proto-consciousness is argued to be irreducible (note: not necessarily primary to matter) and taken to inhere in all forms of matter at some level of the universe (for example, a "rock" doesn't have a mind. Rather, there are subsystems at some postulated fundamental level of the universe - this is where theories diverge - that have the property of a precursor consciousness. When these properties combine in appropriate ways - say, as in a brain, that fundamental proto-consciousness is expressed in different, complex ways). Often, consciousness and matter are either taken to be "two sides of the same coin", or are both fundamental properties of the universe in there own right.
Thus, one does not necessarily have to argue about the primacy of one or the other. Like mass, charge, space, time, whatever, were properties of the universe at the universe's inception, so too was the property of (proto)consciousness. Both consciousnesss and matter co-evolved along side one another, as fundamental universal properties. The ontology of the physical universe is simply expanded at its base to include consciousness - once any one of the many analytic arguments for the ontological irreducibility of consciousness is accepted. Theorists flesh these ideas out in myriad ways.
I encourage anyone who is truly serious about understanding the metaphysics of consciousness to read the attached articles, and pick up a copy of Skrbina's book. These resources detail how the problems associated with consciousness are being approached in academia today. (totally "sans" people like James Kent)
[Also note: A recent survey on Phil-papers.com of "target faculty" philosophers in academia the world over on showed that 27% endorsed some sort of irreducible ontology (NOT necessarily"primacy"
of consciousness - as opposed to physicalism -, while 16% chose "other".]