originally posted to an APDG meetup thread 140925 inquiring about the nature of free willearlier in the same thread: ExploringFreeWill
I think I can fairly answer your questions with an analogy. If you find that the analogy does not hold for you, I can go into deeper or take a different approach.
Consider a guitar. We have a wooden box with a wooden neck, over which are stretched metal strings.
A person plays the guitar. What do we mean by that? A materialist might mean that fingers pluck those strings and the resulting vibrations resonate in the box and the aggregate "sound" gushes out of the box.
But do we call that music? A materialist cannot address the meaning of music. A materialist takes the material and scientifically described world as prime, and has a lot of trouble explaining how something else might be going on. But clearly something else, something very very different, in a whole different ontological domain is indeed going on. It's from that domain that the "cause" of the string's vibrations are emanating, and it's for the production of results in that other domain that they vibrate as they do.
Well, the analogy is that the neurons are like the strings, and their configuration as "brain structures" is something like the box and the neck. We can talk on and on about how those neurons fire according to the constraints of their configuration. And we can examine how at a higher level those structures are able to produce resonance patterns among the chemical vibrations whizzing along those many neurons. But in doing that, we're still not talking about thought or "mind" any more than the materialist observer of the guitar was talking about music.
The guitar exists in order to produce music. It was not made for the purpose of having strings vibrate, but rather for the purpose of producing music. But what is music?
However you might decide to explain what music is, there too you will find by the analogy what the mind and its thoughts are.
One of the keys here is that a materialistic explanation of "what's going on" is woefully under-capable for capturing it with any fidelity. It's not what's happening materially that matters at all in the playing of music. It's what happens at a far downstream derived result of a whole bunch of vibrations under a myriad of constraints played out in the present as it streams into the past with vast complexity, but with deep order driving it.
Music is the reason the guitar was created and the reason the guitar player picks up the instrument and plays it. This is not a material explanation. There is no material explanation. You must look at a different ontological domain, or even several, in order to understand why those strings are vibrating as they are. You must understand the pleasure a human being finds in music, his ability to design and produce an instrument to enable it, his ability to learn to play it, his skill in the playing, and even the reason he has some free time on his hands to do such a strange thing which seems so hard to relate to his organism's survival and thriving. These things all represent patterns which are encoded over myriads of identifiable material substrates, aggregated together in reality in such numbers as to be truly unplumbable depths of variables.
You asked about the bridge. The bridge is there, by which I mean I don't think there's any music going on which is not made of material happenings, and we know that the memories and the preferences and the harmonies and the earth's atmosphere are all there encoded in material things, atoms ultimately, by the unfathomably many. But you can't just walk across that bridge with a reductionist or materialist approach because it's just too complex. The modeling process required to comprehend all the variables necessary to make a materialist explanation of the phenomenon of a guitar concert would probably require more matter to build than the observable universe can make available. For this reason, lacking a scientifically valid bridge so far, we are required to leap across that gap between these ontological domains. It is indeed a leap with some faith in it, but it's not so hard to know it or trust it because 1) whenever we examine it scientifically it does add up, as far as we can see, which isn't far, and 2) we feel it as valid.
And that's really the whole point of phenomenology: Because you can't analyze your way from a material scientific explanation to explaining why the theme to Star Wars is popular, you have to feel it. Literally, that's what our bodies are designed to do. Our bodies are sensing and filtering engines assembled in such a way as to aggregate a summarized model of what's really going on in the universe to become something meaningful. The patterns in the mind of the player are expressed richly through the medium of the physical guitar's being played and those patterns resonate in the mind of the listener. When the pattern they produce somehow "works" with the patterns he has come to like, then he finds pleasure in the hearing.
Pleasure is not just a chemical concentration shift. Music is not just "some vibrations". The patterns which unite the chemistry and unite the vibrations, THAT's the feeling and THAT's the music. They are patterns built over and made of lower level patterns. They ride over top like a C-chord rides over the intervals that make it up.
It's my understanding that this "riding over" of pattern sets, these nested ontological domains, can explain any phenomenon we can know about.