There's just something I'm doing wrong here...
The male, I couldn't locate. I'll deal with him later.
With the female, I had an hour-long debate with much hand-wringing and exasperated sighs on both parts.
Long story short:
1. She is a full-on experimentalist.
2. She focuses on narrow aspects of neurolinguistics, and doesn't really know or care much about consciousness.
2.a. She really doesn't understand half the terms or words Bakker uses, and refuses to read him herself. Even my simplified recap was nearly incomprehensible to her.
2.b. She dislikes all of Bakker's "unscientific" approach to presenting his ideas.
3. Once I gave as clear and thorough a summary of the BBT as I could, she repeatedly...Bakker has no evidence, apparently.
3.a. Bakker does not cite his figure (in the abstract) on the number of calculations performed by the gross brain, and does not describe the consciousness models he name-drops in the first footnote.
3.b. She doesn't see that Bakker presents any evidence toward his core premise that consciousness receives less information than the rest of the brain; we really don't know anything about the brain, and Bakker seems to her to be arguing from a perspective "2000 years in the future".
3.c. She rejected the magic metaphor and vision analogy: "I don't need analogies, I need evidence."
3.d. I hardly even got her to agree (while explicating causal histories and causal gaps with the example of a thrown ball travelling and the act itself of throwing the ball) that the CNS basically works in that example with various internal and external stimuli causing various chains of action potentials until the appropriate motor neurons are activated and the muscular contractions responsible for "throwing the ball" occur. She said, "Consider my position - if *I* don't know that this is 'the so-called 'scientific consensus', then what does that say?"
So, well, what do you make of it? I couldn't convince her of informatic asymmetry - "don't take that for granted" - and I do suppose Bakker's theory pretty much falls apart without it.
Are there any more cogent proofs of informatic asymmetry I could bring to bear? Citations to throw down? I asked her whether she could consciously keep track of all her brain's activity, or consciously control her heartbeat, but she just wasn't buying it for some reason - so that line turned out fruitless.
Any way I could impress the validity of Bakker's approach onto her? "It's just not science" to her, and that seemingly invalidates the whole thing. *shrug*
Conversations are pretty tough; their progress never seems to match my (perhaps overly optimistic) expectations. Internet participation is not preparation enough.
Middle of the conversation: "I'm going to shoot you down somehow, you know?"
End of the conversation: "Look, I don't want to shoot you down."
...
*I propose that we schedule a friendly meeting to have a casual chat, not even necessarily about Bakker*
"Yeah, I'll take more time out of my schedule to go out and meet you to talk about...stuff."
That's sarcasm, isn't it? Though she didn't say it in an acerbic tone...
So, yeah: I get the feeling she's not going to humor me any longer, but I suppose I'd like to hear from you all if only for my own edification.