Agree completely. The brain is so incredibly complex that we've barely scratched the surface. It's not just neurons, which are very complex and vary wildly in genetics between them - it's hundreds of other helper cells all interacting with each other in sometimes bizarre ways.

To try to boil down it all to any simple signal is just never going to work. If we want to map consciousness it's going to be as complex as simulating it ourselves, creating something as dense and detailed as a real brain.

We know that the brain is a structure that works through electrochemical reactions. Synapses transmit signals sent by axons to neurons. We can test this. We can measure it. There's nothing else going on that we can describe using known science.

Ah, we might say, maybe there is an unknown science - we did not know about so much before, like electricity, like X-Rays, like quantum physics, and then we did, and the World changed.

The difference is that we observed something that science could not explain, and then we found the new science that explained it, and a new science was born.

It's pretty clear to me - but you may know more - that we can explain all brain activity through known science. It might be hard to think of us as nothing more than a bunch of electrochemical reactions in a real-world reinforcement learning system, but that's what we are: there's no gap that needs new science, is there?

> There are electrical firing of neurons, absolutely, but do they directly define thought?

Well, surgeons and researchers have shown that electrical stimulation of certain brain regions, can induce "perception" during procedures. They can make a patient have the conscious experience of certain smells, for instance.

It's not conclusive proof of anything, but I wouldn't bet against us getting closer to the mark, than we were when we only considered hydro-dynamics as the model.

This sounds logical and convincing.

At the same time, it should also be easy to falsify.

Has there been an experimental setup like this tested? If I’m not mistaken it should falsify your claim.

Train a decoder on rich neural recordings, then test it on entirely new thoughts chosen under blinded conditions.

If it can still recover the precise unseen content from signals alone, the claim that electrical activity is insufficient is overturned.

seems like trying to take a single pixel signal (so to speak) and interpolate entire image out of it.

Does it make sense to think of thoughts, consciousness etc. as an emergent property of the neuronal activity in our brains?

This is silly. It's the sum of electrical and chemical network activity in the brain. There's nothing else it can be. We've got a good enough handle on physics to know that it's not some weird quantum thing, it's not picking up radio signals from some other dimension, and it's not some sort of spirit or mystical phlogiston.

Your mind is the state of your brain as it processes information. It's a computer, in the sense that anything that processes information is a computer. It's not much like silicon chips or the synthetic computers we build, as far as specific implementation details go.

There's no scientific evidence that anything more is needed to explain everything the mind and brain does. Electrical and chemical signaling activity is sufficient. We can induce emotions, sights, sounds, smells, memories, moods, pleasure, pain, and anything you can experience through targeted stimulation of neurons in the brain. The scale of our experiments has been gross, only able to read and write from large numbers of neurons, but all the evidence is consistent.

There's not a single rigorously documented phenomenon, experiment, or any data in existence that suggests anything more than electrical and chemical signaling is needed to explain the full and wonderful and awe-inspiring phenomenon of the human mind.

It's the brain. We are self constructing software running on 2lb chunks of fancy electric meat stored in a bone vat with a sophisticated network of sensors and actuators in a wonderful biomechanical mobility platform that empowers us to interact with the world.

It explains consciousness, intelligence, qualia, and every other facet and nuance of the phenomena of mind - there's no need to tack on other explanations. It'd be like insisting that gasoline also requires the rage of fire spirits in order to ignite and power combustion engines - once you get to the point of understanding chemical combustion and expansion of gases and transfer of force, you don't need the fire spirits. They don't bring anything to the table. The scientific explanation is sufficient.

Neocortical networks, with thalamic and hippocampal system integrations, are sufficient to explain the entirety of human experience, in principle. We don't need fire spirits animating cortical stacks, or phlogiston or ether or spirit.

Could spirit exist as a distinct, separate phenomenon? Sure. It's not intrinsic to subjective experience, consciousness, and biological intelligence, though, and we should use tools of rational thinking when approaching these subjects, because a whole lot of pseudo-scientific BS gets passed as legitimate scientific and philosophical discourse without having any firm grounding in reality.

We are brains in bone vats - nothing says otherwise. Unless or until there's evidence to the contrary, let that be enough.