GAP INTACT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE...

CH: "Wow. I post a brief aside and I am sucked into the explanatory gap!" 

Well, "The Explanatory Gap" is the theme of this thread...

CH: "Empirical corroboration of...  predictions  [from Laws of Nature (LON)] puts a scientist in a state of feeling that is scientific observation..." 

So does empirical falsification of predictions from LON. So does just about everything else we say and do whilst awake and compos mentis...

CH: "LON... are (statistical) descriptions... (predictive) of how the natural world/scientist combined system feels to the scientist... in the act of scientific observation..." 

Translation: "Making a 'scientific observation' and making and understanding a scientific explanation feel like something, and those feelings are tightly correlated with the data of the observation and the explanation."

But we already knew that. We are now talking about explaining how and why making an observation, and making and understanding an explanation -- and just about everything else we do whilst alive, awake, and compos mentis --  feels like something and correlates tightly with what is going on in the world.

You are not touching the question of how and why at all. You are just reformulating what you take to be the nature of scientific observation and scientific explanation (and presupposing feeling as somehow part of the package). In other words, you are, I'm afraid, begging the question (underlying this topic thread, which is about the explanatory gap), completely.

CH: "There is nothing to a brain but (a) nucleons and (b) electrons and (c) space..." 

Fine. Now how and why do they sometimes generate feeling? 

CH: "Now the meat:... ALL of the descriptions of particles and fields and forces [were] constructed by scientists inside the described system, made of it, using ‘feeling’..." 

"Using" feeling, or whilst feeling? This is where you beg the question, by presupposing (without explanation) that feeling is causal, rather than just correlated with brain processes that are causal (and mysteriously generate correlated feelings too).

(Keep it simple, Colin. Your complicated and somewhat idiosyncratic way of putting things is fooling you into thinking you are making inroads on the explanatory gap, when you are not.)

CH: "LON are constructed presupposing the existence of the scientist and the ability (feeling) that is scientific observation. The scientist is implicitly built into the LON..."

You said that already:  Now, how/why are scientists' (and laymens') observations and explanations felt rather than just brain-functed?"

CH: "NONE of the above LON predict the existence of the feeling that is scientific observation...All presuppose both..."

Quite right. And that is the explanatory gap: Now let's hear how you propose to bridge it...

CH: "[W]e have not even begun to describe the universe in the fashion needed to predict a scientific observer of the kind we are, who sees the observation mechanism behaving [lawfully]...

Indeed; but your point is...?

CH: "The universe is NOT made of atoms or molecules or cells or subatomic particles. These are the things we perceive it to be made of when we look (feel it) as scientists..."

We feel when we do things; scientists do too. But we knew that. (I'm not sure whether you are also telling us that current scientific theory is wrong, and if so, why; but I am pretty sure you are not making any inroads on the explanatory gap: just re-describing it.)

Or perhaps you are alluding here to the fact that although feelings are correlated with the way things are in the world, they are nevertheless incommensurable with them (so it is erroneous to think of feelings as somehow "resembling" the things that correlate with the feelings: red with felt-red, round with felt-round, etc.). -- That's true too, but likewise does not help to bridge the explanatory gap; it's part of the gap.

CH: "What perspective must I adopt on the universe such that electromagnetism behaving in certain specific ways (like a brain) makes it acquire a 1^st person perspective (from the point of view of BEING the electromagnetic fields that ARE the brain), when elsewhere in the body (such as in the peripheral nerves) it fails to do that?..."

Translation: "What is the explanation of how and why (some) brain function is felt, whereas (say) kidney function is not?"

That's the question, alright: But what's the answer? 

(The equivocation on "perspectives" won't help; it just milks the mystery. And the fact that you are focussing on scientific observations and scientific explanations about what there is in the world is not relevant; the same problem would be there if you were just focusing on a layman's "ouch.")

CH: "This rather awkward non-explanation of ‘feeling’ is as far as I need go for now. What the above tells me is that I can blather on forever about LON_X and I will NEVER leap the explanatory gap. It is a-priori meaningless and any expectation that it can is misguided. This does not mean the gap cannot be leapt. It means we haven’t leapt it yet."

OK, I'll wait till you've leapt it, or at least give a principled account of how it could be leapt...

CH: "To leap the explanatory gap is to construct descriptions... in such a way as to show how an observer might function. I know I have the right... descriptions [when they] start to produce observations consistent with [Laws of Nature] such that it reveals itself as the brain material of the (scientific) observer."

This unfortunately sounds as if it is going in circles, without substantive content, just a hope.

 "Consistent with" just means "correlated with" here, and the gap is about causation...

-- SH