On the philosophical treatment of dualism

I undertook to write this page after stumbling on a web link to this article "Why philosophy is so important in science education" by Subrena E Smith, assistant professor in philosophy. Let us quote some exerpts:

"philosophy addresses issues that can’t be settled by facts alone (...) the philosophy of science is the application of this approach to the domain of science (...) science proceeds by induction, the practices of drawing on past observations to make general claims about what has not yet been observed, but that philosophers see induction as inadequately justified, and therefore problematic for science."

" I then touch on the difficulty of deciding which evidence fits which hypothesis uniquely, and why getting this right is vital for any scientific research. I let them know that ‘the scientific method’ is not singular and straightforward, and that there are basic disputes about what scientific methodology should look like. Lastly, I stress that although these issues are ‘philosophical’, they nevertheless have real consequences for how science is done (....) students were skeptical of [the philosophy professor's] views about science, because, as some said, disapprovingly: “He isn’t a scientist.” (...)They are aware that prominent scientists have stated publicly that philosophy is irrelevant to science, if not utterly worthless and anachronistic.(...) many of them believe that scientists can answer philosophical questions, but philosophers have no business weighing in on scientific ones.(...) Why do college students so often treat philosophy as wholly distinct from and subordinate to science? In my experience, four reasons stand out."

"[1.] lack of historical awareness [about the origins of] departmental divisions..."

"[2.] Philosophy doesn’t seem to have any tangibles to show. But, to the contrary, philosophical tangibles are many: Albert Einstein’s philosophical thought experiments made Cassini possible. Aristotle’s logic is the basis for computer science, which gave us laptops and smartphones. And philosophers’ work on the mind-body problem set the stage for the emergence of neuropsychology and therefore brain-imagining technology. Philosophy has always been quietly at work in the background of science."

"[3.] Science, students insist, is purely objective, and anyone who challenges that view must be misguided. A person is not deemed to be objective if she approaches her research with a set of background assumptions. Instead, she’s ‘ideological’. But all of us are ‘biased’ and our biases fuel the creative work of science (...)"

"I invite students to look at something nearby without any presuppositions. I then ask them to tell me what they see. They pause… and then recognize that they can’t interpret their experiences without drawing on prior ideas. Once they notice this, the idea that it can be appropriate to ask questions about objectivity in science ceases to be so strange.
[4.] that they think of science as mainly itemizing the things that exist–‘the facts’–and of science education as teaching them what these facts are. I don’t conform to these expectations. But as a philosopher, I am mainly concerned with how these facts get selected and interpreted, why some are regarded as more significant than others, the ways in which facts are infused with presuppositions, and so on(.. .) What students mean to say by ‘facts are facts’ is that once we have ‘the facts’ there is no room for interpretation or disagreement. It’s not because this is the way that science is practiced but rather, because this is how science is normally taught. There are a daunting number of facts and procedures that students must master if they are to become scientifically literate, and they have only a limited amount of time in which to learn them. "

Now there are indeed times when things are less clear than usually assumed, particularly about how things should be presented (as I innovate in presentation of maths and physics and dig into the relevance of the choice of axioms), and how teaching should be organized (which is actually a political/sociological question which hard scientists often cannot have in mind to work on since it is far from their area of specialization even though they should be concerned since it rules their professional activity itself), but there are also times when things are actually clearer than they seem in non-experts eyes and there are philosophers and other people philosophizing too much about them by not knowing enough the body of evidence.
When the question whether there is or there is not evidence for something, is disputed, philosophy may still be useless, as the root of the dispute and its lack of resolution may be not philosophical in nature, nor matters of principles, but technical : a matter of details that need to be analyzed or interpreted in the very specific contexts, or missing information, or too much information that would need to be sorted out, that would require to involve too many principles too many times in too many ways for a single question, so that people have not the time to go study stuff extensively enough. It would be either impossible or a waste of time to try classifying things into specific principles. While principles would be clear in themselves, they are too far away. Struggling with complexity is the only relevant thing to do.

"(...) science brims with important conceptual, interpretative, methodological, and ethical issues that philosophers are uniquely situated to address"

David Chalmers on dualism

" The collapse dynamics leaves a door wide open for an interactionist interpretation. Any physical nondeterminism might be held to leave room for nonphysical effects, but the principles of collapse do much more than that. Collapse is supposed to occur on measurement. There is no widely agreed definition of what a measurement is, but there is one sort of event that everyone agrees is a measurement: observation by a conscious observer. Further, it seems that no purely physical criterion for a measurement can work, since purely physical systems are governed by the linear Schrödinger dynamics. As such, it is natural to suggest that a measurement is precisely a conscious observation, and that this conscious observation causes a collapse. (...) there are alternative interpretations (...) Nevertheless, quantum mechanics appears to be perfectly compatible with such an interpretation. In fact, one might argue that if one was to design elegant laws of physics that allow a role for the conscious mind, one could not do much better than the bipartite dynamics of standard quantum mechanics: one principle governing deterministic evolution in normal cases, and one principle governing nondeterministic evolution in special situations that have a prima facie link to the mental. Many physicists reject it precisely because it is dualistic, giving a fundamental role to consciousness. (...) There is some irony in the fact that philosophers reject interactionism on largely physical grounds (it is incompatible with physical theory), while physicists reject an interactionist interpretation of quantum mechanics on largely philosophical grounds (it is dualistic). Taken conjointly, these reasons carry little force (...). I have been as guilty of this as anyone, setting aside interactionism in Chalmers 1996 partly for resons of compatibility with physics"

A first question is the share of responsibility in this misunderstanding, between both communities (physicists and philosophers). Are physicists guilty of giving excessive trust to philosophers on this topic ? This is unlikely to happen, since they generally distrust the works of philosophers. They freely choose their personal philosophy, which as explained above they have full right to do with no obligation of backing it up with scientific evidence, as long as this "risk of error" does not undermine the objective validity of their scientific publications. And this is actually the case : this whole issue plays no foundational role for physics and can thus be safely ignored by physics research, in the sense that predictions of quantum physics remain valid independently of the interpretation. More precisely, if the mind chooses by free will the result of some neurological processes among "probable" ones instead of leaving them to the strict application of the probabilities deduced from quantum theory, therefore driving the actual outcomes of these processes away from these theoretical probability laws, this still does not undermine the validity of quantum theory and its probabilistic predictions in most of other, "purely physical" phenomena, that is under circumstances (yet to be characterized) in which such an influence of preferences from any observer's free will would not apply.

Therefore, the responsibility of the misunderstanding has to be mainly put on the shoulders of philosophers. Indeed, considering any description of philosophy in terms of its list of main topics of inquiry, this question of the status of consciousness with respect to physical laws and phenomena regularly appears as a prominent question. Add to this the fact that any study or debate about the interpretations of quantum physics, even those only opposing several interpretations which all deny any role of consciousness, inevitably faces prominent philosophical, metaphysical issues. In such conditions, the debate on the interpretations of quantum physics really ought to have been a main focus of concern for philosophers. Yet there is a kind of big difficulty here : to be able to fully understand the issue and its possible arguments, one needs to study quantum physics first.

A second question is how could so many philosophers, thus, have persisted for so long in the ignorance of this news of such importance for their own work, since these philosophical lessons from modern physics were first explained by Arthur Eddington in his 1928 book "The Nature of the Physical World" and further by more prominent physicists since then ? I mean let us compare a little bit with the methods of physics: when the community of physicists agreed to identify a prominent question of their field (is there a Higgs boson), they undertook to unite their efforts, with a whole structured organization, to build the LHC that would test this hypothesis. Now, which great project did the community of philosophers undertake to investigate the physical possibilities or impossibilities of mind-matter interaction ? Any crowdfunding to support the great and courageous efforts of a few adventurous members of their community who would dare going for the mission of making a little step for a philosopher but giant leap for the philosophical community : undertaking the great voyage to go put a foot on the alien planet of theoretical physics, by attending some high-level courses on quantum physics, and then reporting any philosophical consequences they could learn from there to the rest of philosophers, all waiting in front of their radio or TV set in passionate expectation of that report ? Actually some philosophers did undertake the quest of learning quantum physics but it does not seem clear if while doing so, any of them had in mind the crucial question of assessing the possibility of dualism, not only focusing on some examination of naturalistic interpretations and assessing the merits and drawbacks of each naturalistic interpretation against other naturalistic interpretations. Moreover, why are there still so many other philosophers who pretend to talk about the state of affairs in metaphysics or the mind/body problem by focusing for example on Descartes or other philosophers formulations of the "physical", ignoring all reference to interpretations of quantum physics.

A third question is, did this news of having been so deeply mistaken for so long in their officially "established", teachable body of evidences, news thus brought closer to the eyes of the philosophical community by David Chalmers in 2002, induce the electroshock that such news should necessarily have induced in any decent community of supposedly rational researchers ? How many of those philosophy teachers who had thus falsely presented for so long to their students as a "conclusive proof" that argument of the "closure of physics" which should have been already dismissed as empty since long, had the decency to resign from their academic position to apologize for that fault, otherwise why didn't they ?

Now let us review a few philosophical references and articles, to see how they present stuff.

Encyclopedia articles

Looking at the Dualism article of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, for how it handles the connections with the laws of physics.
The first is "The Conservation of Energy Argument". This argument is ridiculously outdated. It may belong to the history of philosophy, but should have nothing to do in current lists of significant arguments anymore. To say in short, that is because the law of conservation of energy (more precisely the conservation of a 10-dimensional stuff having energy as one of its components in a given frame), is a consequence of the laws of physics but does not determine them : it leaves plenty of freedom for behavior (as is roughly explained already among replies in the wikipedia article : "...may influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity"). In that section I see "The dualists' basically have three ways of replying." Which dualists please ? The first two of these "ways of replying", which are the same, are stupidities that may only be said by people who have no idea about physics so that they are unaware, both that this argument being void does not deserve a reply, and that in modern physics the conservation of energy is not a postulate but a mathematical theorem from the definition of this stuff that is conserved (namely a theorem of curved geometry in general relativity), making it logically impossible for this conservation to be violated whatever law-breaking miracle might be thought of. The "third reply", then, is of course a sketch of the actual modern scientific view explaining by quantum physics the action of immaterial minds over matter, and it is not a reply to the conservation of energy non-argument, but to the actual general argument from a presumed determinism of physics, by the fact that physics is not actually deterministic... Still the expression written there of this "third reply" is polluted by its strangely added two last sentences which are another repetition of the previous two stupid replies ("Further, it should be remembered that the conservation of energy is designed around material interaction; it is mute on how mind might interact with matter. After all, a Cartesian rationalist might insist, if God exists we surely wouldn't say that He couldn't do miracles just because that would violate the first law of thermodynamics, would we?").
The article continues with its next section "c. Problems of Interaction" explaining that supposed "problem", forgetting that it was resolved by the reply by quantum physicists which was mentioned in the above "third reply". The discussion there is senseless since it just involves some philosophical pseudo-concepts of "causality" and the like, ignoring the much more precise solution by quantum physics. Fortunately, it takes note of the vacuity of what would be but an incompetence argument :

"It is useful to be reminded, however, that to be bewildered by something is not in itself to present an argument against, or even evidence against, the possibility of that thing being a matter of fact. To ask "How is it possible that . . . ?" is merely to raise a topic for discussion. And if the dualist doesn't know or cannot say how minds and bodies interact, what follows about dualism? Nothing much. It only follows that dualists do not know everything about metaphysics."

In another wikipedia article : the article on naturalism in philophy,

"contemporary naturalism is a consequence of the build-up of scientific evidence during the twentieth century for the "causal closure of the physical", the doctrine that all physical effects can be accounted for by physical causes."

Finally, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, while still reviewing the usual wasteful stuff, includes a correct report of the main aspect of the natural solution :

"The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess."

More articles

"This paper argues that no convincing case has been made against substance dualism, and that standard objections to it can be credibly answered.
(...) like many other materialists, I have often quickly cited standard objections to dualism that are widely taken to be fatal, e.g. [Lycan 1987: 2–3]—notoriously the dread Interaction Problem. My materialism has never wavered. Nor is it about to waver now (...) Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream, but because the arguments do indeed favour materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to
[in conclusion] The dialectical upshot is that, on points, and going just by actual arguments as opposed to appeals to decency and what good guys believe, materialism is not significantly better supported than dualism."

"...It turns out to be very difficult to say how the mind and body interact once you say that they are made up of different substances. Descartes himself was very aware of this task facing his theory, and (...) give a direct answer to it. Unfortunately, his answer was not altogether convincing.
[in footnote:] The correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia is great fun to read
(...)
It should be kept in mind that substance dualism is very much out of favour in contemporary philosophy of mind (with a very few exceptions - see further reading). In large part, its decline in popularity came from a science-led 19th century movement to bring our understanding of the mind under a world-view that appeals only to entities we would recognise as part of the natural, or physical, world. As a part of this effort to ‘naturalise’ the mind, philosophers started looking for a way to answer the mind-body problem that avoided the substance dualist’s mysterious ‘ghosts in the machine’...Because of this, substance dualism is now normally taught as part of the historical overview of the mind-body problem, and as a useful alternative with which to contrast the substance monist physicalist theories that dominate contemporary philosophy of mind. (...) It’s likely that most students will intuitively be quite sympathetic to dualism, so this is a good place to start in a course on the philosophy of mind. This also means, however, that the arguments against it might be a bit of a hard-sell. It’s important, however, that the students are persuaded of the inadequacy of substance dualism if they are going to stay on board with the search for the right physicalist theory of mind for the rest of the course, so it’s worth spending a bit of time on why it can’t be right. "

"The interaction problem amounts to the challenge to the substance dualist to explain how such causal interaction could take place between substances as radically different – on the substance dualist’s account – as the mind and the body. How is it possible? It is deeply mysterious, ... The substance dualist is left with an explanatory gap which has yet to be filled in satisfactorily; even Descartes had little to say in response to it. "

"Notice that it is really this failure on the part of the substance dualist rather than the argument itself that gives the interaction problem its force. After all, we rarely take the fact that we don’t yet know how to explain something as decisive reason to reject the phenomena that gave rise to the explanatory question in the first place – scientific disciplines would hardly get very far if we did! It is, then, the fact, that the explanatory gap in this case is so apparently difficult to fill in that really gives the interaction problem its teeth.
Teaching tips: As noted above, the force of the interaction problem really comes from the substance dualist’s failure to come up with a satisfying response to the explanatory challenge. One way to get students to see the power of this problem is to get them brainstorming on the part of the substance dualist, each time trying to show that their suggested answer won’t work. This way they will get to feel the frustration of the substance dualist for themselves, and hopefully be moved by the force of the challenge. "

Here is the argument from the causal closure of the physical:
(1) Mental states often, or systematically, cause physical events
(2) Every physical event has a sufficient physical cause
(3) Physical events do not systematically have more than one sufficient cause
Therefore mental causes must be identical to physical causes
(...) The interaction problem is a kind of ‘brute’ argument that works by simply confronting the substance dualist with a seemingly unanswerable explanatory challenge. By contrast, although the argument from the causal closure of the physical relies on a number of premises that require a bit of working out, the syllogistic form of the argument can make its conclusion feel more gratifyingly ‘earned’ than that of the interaction problem "

How can you put an elephant into a fridge in 3 steps ?
(1) You open the door of the fridge
(2) You put the elephant inside
(3) You close the door of the fridge

"We could, according to (2), describe all of the physical happenings in the world (including our bodily movements) in this way, using purely physical language. If that is right, then for every physical event we are sure to find a physical cause – to think otherwise, the thought is, would be something like believing in telekenesis."

"There are also somewhat more theory-laden arguments than this that we could have appealed to to motivate the second premise. The arguments I have in mind rely on the fundamental scientific principle of energy conservation which, roughly speaking, says that the total amount of energy within a closed physical system can’t ever go up or down, even if it can move around the system. If this is right (and it is almost universally accepted) then any physical event must be wholly describable as an exchange of energy occurring entirely within the physical system in question. This is probably more than would be needed to motivate (2) at this level so I won’t pursue this line of thought here, but see further resources below.
Some responses to the causal closure argument have focused on whether or not we have a sharp enough notion of ‘the physical’ to know what a thesis like that of the causal closure of the physical would really amount to. Should it only include entities allowed into our current best physical theories? But how can we be sure that our best theories capture everything there really is to capture in a physical theory? Should we instead be talking about ‘the physical’ as a domain that includes all of the entities in some future or ideal physical theory? But then, do we really know what we’re talking about? "

" For a clear, thorough and reader-friendly discussion of the causal closure of the physical see David Papineau’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: OUP (2009), online copy here:(...)
For more on the principle of energy conservation, have a look at Robin Collins, ‘Modern Physics and the Energy Conservation Objection to Mind-Body Dualism’ in American Philosophical Quarterly...." [which shows the vacuity of the argument, so why having wasted time mentioning that empty argument in the first place ?]

"(Isn’t the causal closure of physics undermined by quantum-mechanical indeterminism? Well, quantum mechanics does call for a more careful formulation of the causal-closure thesis, but this doesn’t matter for the philosophical implications. Let us shelve this complication until Section 2.3.)
[Section 2.3] To make sure we have the right kind of closure thesis, we thus need to require that every physical effect have a physical cause that suffices on its own. However, this last requirement now highlights the need for the final qualification entered above— that every physical effect has a sufficient immediate physical cause ‘in so far as it has a sufficient immediate cause at all’. The reason for this latter qualification is to accommodate the indeterminism of modern quantum mechanics, which tells us that certain physical effects are random, without any sufficient determining cause. At first sight it might seem as if this qualification will empty the causal-closure thesis of any interest, and in particular prevent it from implying that everything with physical effects must itself be physical. For it might seem that quantum indeterminism creates room for sui generis non-physical causes (operations of the will, perhaps) to exert a ‘downwards’ influence on the physical realm, by influencing whether or not random quantum events occur. However, this appearance is illusory. Quantum mechanics still specifies that random physical effects have their probabilities fixed by sufficient immediate physical causes. If we understand the causal closure of the physical as covering this kind of physical determination of physical probabilities, then it will once more rule out any sui generis non-physical cause for a physical effect. For any such sui generis cause would have to make a difference to the probability of the relevant physical effect, and this would once more run counter to the causal closure thesis, understood now as implying that this probability is already fixed by some sufficient immediate physical cause."

"Nevertheless, during the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries an increasing number of scientists have come to doubt the existence of vital and mental forces. "

"The most significant evidence seems to have come directly from physiology and molecular biology, rather than from physics. Over the last hundred and fifty years a great deal has come to be known about the workings of biological systems (including brains), and there has been no indication that anything other than basic physical forces is needed to account for their operation. In particular, the twentieth century has seen an explosion of knowledge about processes occurring within cells, and here too there is no evidence of anything other than familiar physical chemistry"

The same fuss is given for example in the SEP article on naturalism, with this paragraph saying it in a way which vaguely seems to present itself as an argument, but with my best effort I cannot find which logical argument is supposed to be contained there :

"Sometimes it is suggested that the indeterminism of modern quantum mechanics creates room for sui generis non-physical causes to influence the physical world. However, even if quantum mechanics implies that some physical effects are themselves undetermined, it provides no reason to doubt a quantum version of the causal closure thesis, to the effect that the chances of those effects are fully fixed by prior physical circumstances. And this alone is enough to rule out sui generis non-physical causes. For such sui generis causes, if they are to be genuinely efficacious, must presumably make an independent difference to the chances of physical effects, and this in itself would be inconsistent with the quantum causal closure claim that such chances are already fixed by prior physical circumstances. Once more, it seems that anything that makes a difference to the physical realm must itself be physical."

• I cannot find any clear, absolute sense in the concept of "chances" that could anyhow be "fully fixed" by a fundamental law,
• nor what it might exactly, rationally mean for something to "provide no reason to doubt" a given hypothesis (since the normal use of reasons is to rule out doubts, not to introduce them) ;
• Moreover I even see this claim as plain false : quantum mechanics does provide reasons to doubt this quantum version of the causal closure thesis, which if I read it well is more precisely the spontaneous collapse range of theories, hypothesizing a kind of hidden law of spontaneous randomness beyond the law of quantum mechanics as we know them in a strict sense (the unitary evolution) : such an extra law raises high difficulties, both theoretical (it actually needs to break, in a sense, the known law of unitary evolution, and there is no known clean and coherent way of doing so) and empirical (this breaking of the known law should have observable consequences, but this remains purely speculative without a beginning of experimental support).

Conclusion

Philosophers response to this

None of the usually considered forms of dualism face any interaction problem, which is a mere imaginary problem, an artifact caused by the ignorance of academic philosophers who are clueless about physics. I debunked it there :
On the philosophical treatment of dualism
The only relevant question should thus be whether a form of dualism can be found which actually faces an interaction problem. And I finally provided one in the Conclusion of that page.

Answers on /r/askphilosophy should be:
Substantive and well-researched (i.e. not one-liners or otherwise uninformative)
Accurately portray the state of research and literature (i.e. not inaccurate or false)
Come only from those with relevant knowledge of the question (i.e. not from commenters who don't understand the state of the research on the question)

Finally another pseudo-debate occurred in the comments of that video

— "Descartes didn’t give a good answer, nor has any other dualist I’ve ever encountered." who were you talking with ? Academic philosophers ? that sounds like "among thousands of children I played with, I never encountered one with a working solution to go to the Moon". This is all ridiculous because the solution to the mind-body problem was already discovered and understood by physicists almost one century ago. Not speculatively but actually verified as the way the universe works. More comments : http://settheory.net/dualism
Another ridiculous idea, also coming from the insanity of academic philosophy : referring to a supposed distinction between "concrete" and "abstract" objects as if such a distinction made sense. It doesn't. The words "concrete" and "abstract" are just that : words. If you imagine that they actually mean something and oppose each other, you'd have to search for a definition of the difference. But no meaningful sense for these can be found. Physics has its laws. These are mathematical laws, dealing with mathematical objects. The deep nature of so-called material stuff in itself (when consciousness is absent), is mathematical. Now we do have a substance dualism, but it first needs to be clear what this dualism is : it is a dualism between the mathematical (which is the real nature of the so-called purely physical) and the conscious (which escapes mathematical description).
Moreover, another problem that you completely overlooked is the role of time. Supposedly different ontological categories would not be so different if they were all subject to the same flow of time, that would be essentially the more primitive common stuff from which all derive. But mathematical and conscious ontological categories are so separate that they cannot be subject to the same flow of time. Actually each of them is structured by its own flow of time, both flows of time are interestingly similar in their structures, namely they are both growing block flows, but they are absolutely not flowing in the same direction. They are rather orthogonal to each other. Now how can 2 substances interact "in time" if their times flow orthogonally to each other ? Your proposal does not answer. But by learning physics, the solution comes up. I explained it in http://settheory.net/quantum-philo.pdf

— why do you assume that consciousness 'escapes mathematical description'? can you prove that this is true, even in theory?

— what are you expecting ? that a long standing debate can have an easy end by a simple proof that just quickly convinces everybody ??? This point (that consciousness is not mathematizable) is not exactly an assumption, and is anyway not arbitrary, but a key aspect of necessities for a coherent ontology (I mean a proper one, which may have nothing to do with what many academic philosophers think). The understanding of this, which some people may directly perceive as obvious, may otherwise require some deep exploration of ontological issues, which is a matter of everyone's own exploration path and cannot be exactly reduced to any easily sharable formal proof, for the reason of its very point : rigorous proofs are mathematical ones, and thus can only rigorously explore what is mathematical, and thus cannot directly express and thus less prove any statement about consciousness which isn't a possible object for them. Yet after deep consideration I see it as absolutely necessary, just as much as some math theorem or axiom of arithmetic. Some exploration of the foundations of math, to which consciousness can then be compared, and which I precisely worked to clarify, can help. More details :
http://settheory.net/nonsense-naturalism
Some points of http://antispirituality.net/skepticism-5 and also the ""Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence !" section of part 2.
More importantly http://antispirituality.net/skepticism-6

— It seems to me very plausible that consciousness can [and should] have a mathematical description. I see no compelling reason to disqualify that possibility outright. for instance, consider approaches like IIT (Integrated Information Theory) introduced by Tononi, and the more recent work by Koch [and Crick] which presents a picture of 'emergence' (or more strictly; a modern version of panpsychism) with a mathematical formalism. if not a proof for the assumption [and i do think it is an assumption], then how about an argument for rejecting even the possibility (a bold claim) of a mathematical description of consciousness?

— Well that is your opinion, so what ???? I thought I was very clear how much I expected that you would "see no compelling reason to disqualify that possibility out". I just consider that you have some kind of primitive way of thinking (I'm not sure the right words to describe this) and focus on irrelevant approaches to the problem which are not providing you the means to conclude, while I happen to have some in-depth insights of special kinds which ultimately provide some clarity but are quite long and somewhat uneasy to explain, and for which I gave you links to longer explanations. Be honest, you did not take the time to study these or did you ? because I guess it is quite a long read which I offered, and which would need quite more time for you to ponder before replying further. And thus as long as you did not study this, what can be the interest for me to see you proudly push forward how much clueless you are about any of the reasons I have for my conclusions ? Please know that I understand very well the possibility for some people to spend many lifetimes exploring paths of research with ideas as you refer to that may feel to them like plausible suggestions of "theoretical possibilities" for consciousness to come from emergence. As for me I just see no point to check about this because I know in advance that it is a total waste of time, an endless runaway through infinite nonsense. It is all about doing everything to forget the key ontological issues of why it is all just infinite nonsense, to lose one's mind into totally irrelevant aspects of the question. A so spectacularly successful failure to ever be able to conclude. Yes you may be passionate and far into that. So what ? I gave you the links if you want to start learning something possibly more fruitful. Whether you like to follow these or not is not my business. I said it once, I said it twice. Do I need to insist : I do not consider the comments space of youtube videos as an appropriate place to publish serious, self-sufficient works on important issues ever likely to suffice to convince anyone with very different convictions. The appropriate place where I explain stuff is my web sites which I can write in peace and necessary lengths as I see relevant and which anyone can visit for free, to be well-structured and not polluted and essentially destroyed in its possible usefulness by the chaos of irrelevant questions and pseudo-objections by a single person who happens to be there to push forwards his misunderstandings. Now you can keep repeating however you like in this miserable comments space your "reasons to be skeptical" towards this opportunity of learning which I offered you. But I will not bother replying to the same one more time.

— You say: "This is all ridiculous because the solution to the mind-body problem was already discovered and understood by physicists almost one century ago. Not speculatively but actually verified as the way the universe works" but in your linked article you reference William G. Lycan's paper "Giving Dualism its Due" [which you applauded] in which he writes:

"I believe it is that even now we have no good model at all for Cartesian interaction. Descartes tried the analogy of gravitational attraction, which was promptly blasted by Elisabeth. No one has done much better since"

The 'solution' you seem to be alluding to is the notion of the conscious 'observer' playing a role in the 'collapse' of the wave function in quantum mechanics measurements (correct me if I'm wrong), which Lycan appeals to, but this is hardly a solution as the idea is not even close to widely accepted [among physicists] and it has been shown that consciousness need not play a role whatsoever in quantum behaviour and/or measurements [and this is the majority view among physicists as well] so in what sense has 'the solution to the mind-body problem already been discovered and understood' exactly?

Actually, I did take the time to read your article and the article you referred to within it just fyi which I feel is more than 99% would do , so I mean no disrespect with my honest inquiries and criticisms.

— While I did put a quote from the article "Giving Dualism its Due", I (clearly !?) meant it only as a illustration of the actual google-results-observable lack of unanimity among philosophers, in contrast to what some other philosophers seem to present as a consensus in their discipline, namely this (so terribly mistaken) belief that there would be evidence against dualism, while there actually isn't. Now you imagine that it would be relevant to quote more details from this article by William G. Lycan's paper, as if I meant it as a reference of accurate report of the science on the matter. I didn't. Remember, he is also an academic philosopher. Didn't I insist enough on how incompetent I consider academic philosophers to be on this matter, which rather requires special competence in physics ? Now if Lycan wrote that "No one has done much better since", from whom do you think he tried to inform himself in search for candidate solutions ? Philosophers or physicists ? You write that "this is hardly a solution as the idea is not even close to widely accepted [among physicists]" and that "[and this is the majority view among physicists as well]". Since when the appeal to majority opinions has been a scientific argument ? Didn't I explain that it is not the ordinary official responsibility of physicists to investigate that question, though their competence would be crucial there, because their job is to study the physics which holds independently of metaphysical interpretations ? Yes the world is in a terrible situation in terms of the division of work between disciplines, which does not help to clarify interdisciplinary questions. But such difficulties should not justify the adoption of excuses to lazily avoid addressing the core of the matter when trying to reach and proclaim conclusions.
You play with ambiguities when reporting that "it has been shown that consciousness need not play a role whatsoever in quantum behaviour and/or measurements". I can read this sentence and fully agree with it, and at the same time consider it completely irrelevant to the question we were discussing, that is the fundamental role of consciousness to collapse the quantum "wavefunction" (I'd rather call it the quantum state, that is the Von Neumann density operator). Because this collapse, this actualization of one possible measurement result to become real against alternatives, done by the immaterial consciousness, is NOT a physical process. It is thus NOT studied by physics, it has nothing to do with the "quantum behaviors" which are physical behaviors, nor with the measurement process. Because measurements are also physical processes, done by unconscious measurement devices, of course they cannot have anything to do with consciousness, what do you expect ?
Now as you point out this appearing consensus among physicists on this question so coming expressed in such flawed and irrelevant terms, again, what are you expecting, if you really did what you just pretend to have done, that is to read what I wrote on the topic. Indeed you say you "did take the time to read [my] article and the article [I] referred to within it just fyi which [you] feel is more than 99% would do". Which article of mine did you read please ? Ah, I guess you just meant that you read my article /dualism, which could already feel like a big work to you, at least more than most academic philosophers would do. Haha. So much for what this implies on the general attitude of academic philosophers trying to investigate questions. In this page of mine I did not claim this page would already contain itself what my arguments were, or did I ? If you read in the abstract of that page, you could see what a quite different point this page would be about, i.e. this very widespread lack of seriousness of attitude among academic philosophers, which you are incidentally confirming by your 99% note.
If you were serious in your claim of having tried to read my explanations, thus, you'd have seen my introduction sentence to the section "The naturalism of physicists" in page http://antispirituality.net/skepticism-5 :
"While I already explained by my text on dualism the behavior of philosophers rejecting dualism for "physical reasons", I still have to comment on the behavior of physicists doing the same for "philosophical reasons". "
which merely echoes the end of the quote from Chalmers which I gave in the page /dualism which you precisely claim to have read - so that I no more see any logical possibility to excuse you the least bit.
Therefore your reply is an absolute zero, in claiming to report a sociological state of the matter which I already reported myself and provided detailed explanations for.
Now how hopeless is your pseudo-attempt to debate me, as if you knew something. I spent much of my life since teenage passionately exploring with great success the depths (core logical architecture) of mathematics and theoretical physics, so I know very well, first-hand, what these matters are actually saying. This gives me a quite ironical perspective on the widespread rumors about what physics would supposedly be saying, when these rumors actually come from a combination of philosophical prejudice having nothing to do with the understanding of physics and its deep math structure, and heavy misunderstandings on the objects of disagreement : what is exactly this position of the role of consciousness, initially explained by Von Neumann, but which since then so many people claim to be able to criticize just because they're incidentally the only people in the room playing the great game of punching the void, smashing their favorite straw man with the full freedom and vanity given by the current absence of any reference person with the competence to provide the reminders of what the real object of the debate was. Yet, did you also miss that, I also provided an incredible chance for anyone interested to finally catch up relatively fast with this core of physics required for any debate on its metaphysical implications to be possible.
Moreover, didn't you notice the logical inappropriateness of your request for evidence on the non-mathematical nature of consciousness.
Your initial statement was of the form "There is no known logical possibility for A" (where A = dualism).
To which I replied like : there is a possibility for A, namely by a position with statements A and B.
To which you replied "Do you have evidence for B ?". Well, ... ????
Do you have yourself any evidence for Not B ?
What you were asking for, did not logically require any evidence for B. Only a lack of evidence for Not B.