Do the experiences of a conscious being, such as a human, exist in physical reality?

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No, they don’t.

Oh sure, if you put a bullet through your brain, your conscious experiencing will stop, and what happens next is anyone’s guess. But just because you can stop your conscious experiencing by ending the brain, doesn’t mean that the experiences themselves are physical.

My favorite analogy for this is computer processing. If you stuck a voltage lead or leads onto a processor and read out the voltages of the “brain” of the computer, you’d come out of the exercise no more knowledgeable about what the computer is actually doing than if you just guessed.

If you want to know what your computer is doing, you won’t be able to find that information by inspecting the actual physical hardware. Instead you have to look at the software.

It’s not like looking at a mechanical system, where studying the workings is giving you actual insight into how the machine is working. No, you need to understand the programming.

So what do you do? Go look at the bits that are resting in memory? We know, because that’s how the computer works, that the bits in memory are telling the processor what to do. So you go look at those bits and can you understand the computer?

Nope. Hooking physical devices up to the memory chips to tell you the physical status of the chips is going to send you down the long garden path. It would be like trying to figure out alien civilization by looking at one of their lunch boxes.

No, the thing that gives you ultimate insight on what the computer is actually doing, you won’t find on the machine itself. Where do you find it? In books.

So does it make sense now to say that what the computer is actually doing at any point in time is physical and that the actual physical referent is the book? Nonsense, it doesn’t work that way. The software algorithms can be described in books, but that doesn’t mean that they live there.

Sure, just like the brain, you can stop whatever a computer is doing by destroying the CPU. But that doesn’t mean that what the computer is doing is physical, located in the CPU. No, the meaning behind what it’s doing is abstract. It doesn’t live anywhere. It’s math. The closest you can get is by looking at the source code. But even that’s not physical. It will give you the same kind of insight that looking at a mechanical system, like a water wheel, will on the system. But the workings of the system are not physical. They don’t use physical rules. They use the rules of software.

Similarly, the rules your brain operates by are nominally located in your brain, as it is a physical structure and it does have to follow those rules. But it’s the same sort of physicality that the computer has. True in the unimportant sense, but wrong in the important one.

You don’t get a lot of insight into human behavior simply by studying brainwaves, or any physical input the brain can give you. We can liquify the brain and determine it’s precise chemical composition. That would tell us a lot about the brain, if what was important about it was happening chemically. But it’s not.

You simply can’t gain any insight about human experience by examining the physical aspect of the brain.