system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How could it be the case that the mind/consciousness is anything others than neurons or some other physical state?

Hey all,

I have been going over some philosophy of mind stuff that I remembered briefly from undergrad and I just feel like I am absolutely missing *something*. I read "What is it Like to be a Bat?" and I just... don't get it. Nagel seems to be saying that bat's have conscious experiences, which are subjective, and are vastly different from our own. We cannot precisely know what those are or what they are like, even if we can watch every neuron in the bat's brain fire as they experience those things. I just don't see how the upshot here is that the conscious experience is somehow something other than neurons (or some other physical phenomenon). You are reading this and experiencing some sort of subjective state as you do. But they idea that this state is somehow not a product of things physically happening in your brain makes no sense to me, this seems like a massive leap.   
Another argument, about Mary in the colorless world, seems similarly contrived to me. Sure, Mary could know what the brain does when it sees red without ever seeing red and sure, she may learn something new when she sees red for the first time, but that doesn't make that knowledge any less dependent upon neurons/a physical state. 

But I know these essays are classic and that a lot of very intelligent people refrain from adopting physicalism because of these arguments; I conclude that I just must be misunderstanding or missing something critical.

Thanks y'all!
gpt
>  But they idea that this state is somehow not a **product** of things physically happening in your brain makes no sense to me, this seems like a massive leap.

> but that doesn't make that knowledge any less **dependent** upon neurons/a physical state.

What's interesting about what you write here, is that your title asks "how could it be the case that consciousness is *anything other than* neurons or some other physical state?", but then what you say in your post is that consciousness is a "product" of your brain, or is "dependent upon" your brain.  But these are different claims!  The property dualists *agrees* that consciousness is a product of the brain, and that consciousness is dependent on your brain.  But that does not entail that consciousness is identical to some state of the brain, or anything like that.