I’m claiming there’s quite a crude mistake in the book, both in the very presentation of the “paradox” and in the proposed solution to it (because there is nothing to solve). In my humble opinion, it would be right to omit it in future editions, because it illustrates nothing and, in my view, is embarrassing.
I’m only asking whether I understood your intention correctly, in order to validate my claim.

Attached are the pages I’m referring to.

The error as formulated is that the source of the mirror effect supposedly shows there is a difference between up/down and right/left, stemming from how we define the concepts without noticing the differences.

In my view — this is baseless.
There is no difference at all between up/down and right/left.
Differences tied to the source of gravity are irrelevant. To see this, it is enough to imagine the same experiment with a person lying down facing a mirror.

The mistake in the “paradox” lies in missing the following distinction:
The mirror displays everything on its actual side.

The inversion is created simply by the fact that we rotated the figure 180 degrees toward the mirror — a rotation in which the points are reversed according to the axis of rotation.
The watch is indeed on the left side even for the observer after the figure turns toward the mirror. She simply has her back to the observer.

The axis of rotation determines what is preserved and what is reversed.
In the experiment described — a person turns 180 degrees around the vertical axis, and therefore the inversion is between right and left.
If we rotate that same person toward the mirror around the horizontal axis passing through his waist — a kind of upside-down flip — then at the end he will be facing the mirror with his head down and feet up, while his right hand will still be on the right side for the person looking in the mirror.

It is true that when we look in the mirror we infer that the watch is on the figure’s right hand (which appears on our left); but that is certainly only because of the horizontal symmetry of our body, nothing more.
This is easy to understand.
If we had vertical bodily symmetry and horizontal asymmetry instead (one hand only on the right), then in the upside-down inversion example (which this time would be an inversion around an axis of symmetry) we would see the single hand as an anchor and conclude, similarly, that the mirror reverses up and down as well (which here too would of course be true, since that already happens in the process of turning toward the mirror).

Did I miss something in understanding your intent in the book?

If not — don’t you think the proposed solution is mistaken?

Especially since it tries to distinguish between up and down when in practice there is nothing in the mirror effect itself that really distinguishes them (it is enough to imagine a person lying opposite a mirror — and everything you described about right and left immediately applies to up and down).

The differences between up and down in terms of the center of the earth are meaningless for our purposes. The “paradox” can be illustrated in any rotational transformation of a Cartesian coordinate system…

Hello,
I referred there to the remarks of Gadi Alexandrovich, who describes what you wrote. That is the mathematical perspective. But it still does not contradict what I wrote, which explains the matter on the everyday level.
The experiment when I’m lying down is a bit confusing. It reverses right and left (because I am used to relating to my hands as right and left, not as up and down as they are now). But it still does not reverse up and down. That is, the hand with the watch will indeed be the right hand, but it is still the one closer to the ground. So in my opinion my explanation still stands.

Thanks for the previous answer.

A more general question:
From the summary of things up to Chapter 14 with the Libet experiment, it seems the essence of the arguments in favor of libertarianism is roughly this:

1. Both the principle of causality and the feeling of free choice are based on intuition, and it is not obvious that the former should be preferred over the latter.

That is very understandable, even if it does not settle the matter.

2. The attempt to project from the neural to the mental is a kind of conceptual mistake (and it was explained why).
Question: it seems this is begging the question. I would be glad to hear your clarification as to how the analysis presented in the book rules out the following (simpler?) hypothesis:
I, for example, argue for the superiority — out of greater simplicity, though one that does indeed explain all the facts — of the view that the soul that experiences qualia is not a separate substance, but rather a case of the brain as a whole displaying (weak) emergence.

The mental arguments — I read Taylor’s arguments, and in general the demonstration from Mary’s room and its parallels — but they do not seem powerful enough to rule out anything: it is indeed true that logical explanations and physical knowledge will never manage to teach a person things he will feel for the first time only when he tastes/sees the color/etc.;
but it seems that this is only carelessness in defining the totality of physical knowledge:
for the same thing can be said even about the sensory nerves! No knowledge will replace a sense, but it does not seem that anyone would infer from that anything other than the fact that the trigger for those nerves (which are uniquely connected in their own way to the brain) cannot be initiated through analytical thought/memory, but is built to be triggered by the retina/skin/taste buds and the like.

So I ask now — in what way is this different from the process of consciousness?
For by the same logic, I say that mental sensations are a certain innervation of the areas responsible for pleasure and pain — which themselves are nothing but a network built to respond (all the way to the motor parts of the brain) in a way that promotes/prevents motor actions that increase (in the end) that very pleasure/pain!

So the question returns — what in the proof from Mary’s room forces a separate substance?

The explicit conclusion in the book — it seems — is based on the sentence saying that the fact that pain, pleasure, taste, color, and every sensory input add something even for someone who knew everything about them in advance except for experiencing them.

It seems to me the simple explanation is:
The information about what they feel like simply cannot be stored in the memory part, but only in the part responsible for sensation (similar to the way the optic nerves transfer information to the part of the brain responsible for recognizing images and not to the analytical part, etc.).
Thus, ostensibly, it would be explained why physical information about the process (which will be stored in memory and be available for analytical processing) indeed does not exhaust what there is to know about color/taste/etc., but without needing to posit an additional substance, only a much simpler explanation:
The knowledge does not exhaust it because the sensation of color is the responsibility of another, separate region of the brain, which there is no way to trigger from the analytical lobe except only from the sensory one / memory alone (except that memory too requires a first sensory trigger).

And do not answer me that if we map all the information about such a network and store it on a magnetic disk / in brain memory, we still would not expect it to experience anything; for the one that feels is not the storage area, but the pleasure-and-pain area that exists in the brain and is not triggered by what is found in analytical knowledge.

According to this explanation, the mental, then, is only the weak emergence (as required…) of a deterministic neural network, whose sensations (?!) that we call pain and pleasure are only the very operation of a network structure already configured to respond motorically accordingly:

In simple words:
Not that there is some additional someone here, and only he experiences the pain that is the expression of the specific innervation (= begging the question);

Rather, all sensation and choice are explained by a network, with an initial structure that gives concrete translation (even if plastic and dynamic) of inputs into concrete outputs (according to their weights on that part of the network of pleasure/pain).

Of course Descartes’ cogito comes to mind, with which the book opens, but that too is no contradiction. This network, which infers ontologically that it exists — indeed exists. But why assume it is something beyond this network itself?

I’d be glad for your response, including in the body of the points if that is more convenient (even though in the end my question is one question that proposes an alternative and addresses possible counterarguments / ones anticipated in the book).

Thanks and with appreciation,

I do not understand the questions.

1. Let me preface by saying that in general I am not trying to prove my position, but to show its plausibility. So it is enough for me that the findings of science do not force me to give it up. After all, everything begins with the libertarian intuition.
2. I did not understand your proposal to jump from the neural to the mental. There is no explanation and not even any language that pretends to hint at a direction that does this. So if anything, this seems like strong emergence. Are you claiming that this is nevertheless weak emergence, even though we have not yet discovered how it happens and have no idea how it could even be possible? If so, the burden of proof is on you. When you see something essentially different from its components and you do not have the faintest idea how it arises from them, the simple assumption is that there is something else there (the raspberry syrup example).
3. I did not understand your distinction between the sensory nerves and consciousness. I identify them and say the same thing about both. Sensation too occurs in the mind and not in the brain, and the question of emergence indeed arises there as well.

1. Understood. Though my second claim is that perhaps it is more reasonable that even if they do not truly force one to give it up, they at least turn it into a kind of “freedom (for now) from the gaps,” until we find the mechanism.
Because in 2 what I mean is that the concepts are not necessarily separate and emergence has not been ruled out, as follows:

2. “There is no language that makes the transition from the neural to the mental”: first of all, one has to prove at all that the two layers are different, and I have not seen such a proof. The only proof, brought on p. 239 from Taylor about the difference between what I believe and the very definability of the question of what my body believes, is not clear at all:
The term “I believe” expresses altogether the current pathway of logical gates in my brain through which a certain input is going to pass.
I believe that it is now night means that the network of neurons (represented by that network of logical gates) produces a positive answer when faced with an input of 23:00 on the clock.
Are you claiming that the possibility that a network relates to itself and to its results in the terminology of belief and the like — really requires a separate entity?!
If so, I would be glad to understand why the explanation I proposed is not simpler (answers everything), and removes the need for a superfluous entity.

3. Continuing question 2 — I also do not see a need to prove a transition from here to there:
True, it is not mathematically analytical (at the moment) like statistical mechanics, which grounds thermodynamics in the dynamics of microscopic particles.
But has a connection between different mental sensations and more complex and extended neural responses really been ruled out?
Let me clarify my meaning:
At one extreme there is a reflex / impulsive response which, given input x, immediately creates response y;
At the other extreme, however — it is entirely reasonable to posit a more complex response, in which input x does not trigger immediate action y. Instead, it triggers only remembering the situation. From there, as part of thinking (about the injustice done to me, for example), that event available in memory, by way of analysis (through System 2 in Kahneman and Tversky’s terms) that is initiated by some trigger (not necessarily sensory — for example, shifts of attention and recollection) — that event joins the memory containing all the wrongs done to me by that person. These together motivate me toward an act of retaliation against him.

Certainly in practice it would be difficult to trace such a neural chain, one that includes delay, stopping, and return to action, etc.

All this may be an unproven hypothesis, but if it is not fundamentally absurd, and is simpler, then it is certainly simpler than positing the soul — and that alone is enough to offer an alternative explanation.
For such a case, to say “you still haven’t proved it” only because “I still haven’t measured/calculated it” — doesn’t that make the threshold merely “freedom from the gaps”? No?

I do not understand these questions. Understanding is a mental act, and that cannot be denied. At most you can claim that the mental emerges from the material, and about that I argued what I argued in the book. But you cannot deny that the mental is not a collection of logical gates. That is simply conceptual confusion. Just as pain is not the wound and not the currents in the brain that produce it, and just as the color yellow is not the electromagnetic wave that produces it nor the currents in the brain that produce the sensation of yellow.

That is exactly what I do not understand — why not??

Light undergoes transformation into an electrical signal (in the retina, just as in an electro-optical transducer).

But the currents from the skin axon that reach the brain and are converted into internal currents that we ultimately experience as pain — why “can’t I deny” that they are not the pain, unless I am begging the question that there is an entity that experiences them?

Why do you assume there is a separate entity that experiences pain? From what I understand — because of the immediate feeling of the pain experience that cannot be denied. Right?
But perhaps our interpretation of it as an experience is not an experience at all but only an ensuing neural response (of discomfort and the creation of a drive to act so as to leave the painful state)?

I of course understand the question echoing in the background of “who is the one who feels?” or experiences…
But that is the heart of my question. How do we distinguish between the existence of an entity, and an alternative possibility according to which the machine responds and also knows how (besides motor actions) to define and describe its map of stimulations by saying “it hurts me” and the like, when the feeling we describe as pain is only a stimulus to scream, get out of the situation, and so on?

Could you sharpen it — even just in headings is enough. I read carefully back and forth through the relevant parts in the sequence of chapters — where exactly does the hypothesis fail according to which the experience we describe is only an ensuing neural response (not only motor but first of all cerebral-neural…)?

I truly am unable to understand the problem and do not see what there is to explain here.
I’ll try one last time, step by step: in your opinion, does yellow light exist in the world itself or only in our consciousness? And if in our consciousness, must one not posit a perceiving entity beyond the currents in the brain themselves and their electrical processing?

Yellow light is from the outset an expression drawn from our consciousness of the electrical signals from the retina when that specific wavelength hits it.
But the discussion revolves around the question what exactly “our consciousness” even means.
Under the a priori assumption of a perceiving entity — of course in the physical world there exists only the wave at a wavelength of about 470 nm and not the consciousness of the entity;

But I do not see why or how we have refuted the possibility that the perceiving entity is nothing but a neural derivative, continuing currents in another area of the brain that feels pleasure. That is, in another part of the network (belonging to another part and process in the brain).
Regarding sensation too, my claim is that pleasure is only the term that we (the network) give to the continuation phenomenon of the development of continuing currents in the pleasure area (which electrically, in the strictest sense, drive the continuation of actions, both motor and analytical).

I understand that your claim is that the immediate feeling of experience ontologically requires the existence of an experiencer. But I did not understand whether it is not possible that this is only an artificial separation between two stages and regions in the brain, when what we call experience is also a cerebral electrical process?

Forgive me, but I’ve given up.