The physical world, as an explanation, clearly has more prior probability than the physical world plus fundamental consciousness. (And that seems like a more realistic form of the question. I have yet to see anyone, even those who like to link modern physics with consciousness, actually replace part of the first theory with a new assumption about fundamental consciousness.)
Posterior probability (meaning the amount of belief you should give to each theory after you look at all the evidence, r_claypool) seems trickier. Dualist philosophers might argue that when we fail to logically derive consciousness from the assumption of a physical world, that counts as evidence for dualism. But as gjm suggests, mainstream dualism doesn’t seem to change our expectations about certain matters. In particular, it does not tell us when or in what situations a physical process leads to conscious experience. You’d have to describe those situations in ways a physicalist like me could agree with, and add that to our scientific picture of the world along with whatever assumptions dualism entails. On the face of it we can drop the last part and have a simpler theory.
My rant on taking the description of when consciousness happens as an additional law of reality got too long. Suffice it to say, that also seems wrong to me epistemologically.
The physical world, as an explanation, clearly has more prior probability than the physical world plus fundamental consciousness. (And that seems like a more realistic form of the question. I have yet to see anyone, even those who like to link modern physics with consciousness, actually replace part of the first theory with a new assumption about fundamental consciousness.)
Posterior probability (meaning the amount of belief you should give to each theory after you look at all the evidence, r_claypool) seems trickier. Dualist philosophers might argue that when we fail to logically derive consciousness from the assumption of a physical world, that counts as evidence for dualism. But as gjm suggests, mainstream dualism doesn’t seem to change our expectations about certain matters. In particular, it does not tell us when or in what situations a physical process leads to conscious experience. You’d have to describe those situations in ways a physicalist like me could agree with, and add that to our scientific picture of the world along with whatever assumptions dualism entails. On the face of it we can drop the last part and have a simpler theory.
My rant on taking the description of when consciousness happens as an additional law of reality got too long. Suffice it to say, that also seems wrong to me epistemologically.