@paddy: and that is exactly what I was saying. There is no non-materialist viewpoint in science. You have a testable hypothesis proven or disproven by observation or you don’t. What we experience as a thought is well understood in the neurosciences and you can indeed observe that people have brain activity before they become aware of the thought. As Lawrence Krauss says: the why question is really a how question.
What slimboyfat and some others theorize is that really, this doesn’t prove anything, because you could be wrong. Well, that’s true, but then come with a testable hypothesis that improves on the current understanding and predictions and observations we can make. Just because we could be wrong does not mean something metaphysical is happening, we know Newtons laws are wrong, but they are still useful enough to fly to the moon, there is a lot to learn about thoughts and consciousness but that doesn’t mean it is not something that exists outside the physical processes we know off or somewhere outside our brain as some would like it to be.
I think we all know what a thought is, it is the inner monologue going on in our head that parses and interprets and attempts to predict the future based on the information we receive from our senses. The thoughts we have are directly related to our current observations as well as historical information (memories) we have stored, in whatever abstract method we do that. The reason we know that in psychology is that we can put ourselves in the other persons shoes (figuratively) and based on the prior information we know about that person, we can deduce their thoughts, we also know most people think the same way about the same things, so even though we abstract things in our own way, as a group, we can quite accurately predict thoughts and actions based on very little information (we just need to know gender, age group and sociological status) which is what advertisers do on a daily basis.
Chalmers, quoted above is a dualist. He believes that the “simple” consciousness is easily explainable by physical processes, whereas the more complex questions can only be explained by supernatural (although he doesn’t say as much, he just says that some things can’t be reduced to natural explanations, which is basically the same as admitting supernatural intervention). In my opinion that’s just the god of the gaps argument, but I’m sure those people wouldn’t admit that.