Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter.

This has never been a good proxy for truth. It is also completely irrelevant given that the majority of the world has never studied neuroscience.

>science has no idea what consciousness is

Not true. Neuroscience has discovered a lot about consciousness. I recommend Principles of Neural Science if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Fifth-Kande...

>Plus, there are all kinds of problems and contradictions if the mind reduces to matter.

Such as?

Perhaps you can explain what science has discovered about consciousness. As far as I know, the closest is a network analysis metric used to signify whether something is conscious. But that does not tell us what consciousness is, only some of the necessary conditions, if that.

Here is a list of problems off the top of my head regarding material minds:

- Math is inherently immaterial. I cannot destroy the number 1. Infinity cannot physically exist. Negative numbers, zero, imaginary numbers, the real number line do not correspond to physical objects.

- If our mind is material, there is no way we can know any kind of truth. Truth doesn't really have meaning. Yet we do know some degree of truth.

- If consciousness is a particular configuration, then the same configuration is the same consciousness, which would imply instantaneous awareness of two completely distinct parts of the universe by the same consciousness with two copies of the configuration.

- Free will and qualia have no meaning in a materialistic worldview, yet are essential to just about everything we do everyday.

What problems and contradictions?