I agree with the materialist claim that, barring the existence of something like a soul, mind is a interaction pattern between physical components within the central nervous system, and particularly within the brain. I do not see how this would reasonably lead anyone to ignore different levels of organization. The reductionistic perspective doesn't say "thoughts are not real"-- it just says they are made of smaller components!

I certainly empathize with criticism of psychiatry's overemphasis on certain kinds of treatment. Psychiatric medicine is a mess, more of a mess than the mess that is medicine in general. (Which, as an industry, does a lot of stuff in a quite unscientific manner.) Perhaps your complaint is medicine, and not about any purported philosophy of mind?

I'm trying to fish out the actual sources of disagreement. My concern is you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting a certain set of scientific and philosophical beliefs when your real dispute is elsewhere.

Who are these neuroscientists who think mind/consciousness is
epiphenomenal? I don't see that position represented anywhere. The
hard materialists should say that mind is complex abstraction of
neural patterns, so thought is as real is neural activity. The
substance dualists think consciousness is quantum gravity (Penrose) or
some undiscovered thing, but their claim on the ontological
distinctness is even stronger than the materialists.

This makes me curious. Can you point me to any random article that you
think espouses or advances the view that consciousness is an
epiphenomenon?

Duff, your major point is good, but I fear you're using Jeff as a straw man. No competent scientist or engineer would agree that software is epiphenomenal. There are still *de-facto* measurable differences in the charges of microprocessors running different instructions. We conceive in software to enable abstraction and to handle complexity. In the same way, we generally wouldn't build a mathematical model of an Boeing 747 on an atom-by-atom basis without intermediate levels of organization.

That's all I wanted to say, since I think your point is that popular advice, and perhaps some psychology puts too much emphasis on the wrong level of organization. That is a very good point.

I *don't* think you're actually trying to posit that the hard problem of consciousness is fundamentally intractable. (If you *are* trying to do so, I'm gonna have to send you over to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Less Wrong Zombies sequence.)

Great way to put it, Richard. Even in a much more general sense, much of expertise is knowing *where* to look, and how to ask good questions.