Given what artificial neural networks are already capable of, it shouldn't seem like a magic trick what our own brains are capable of (from the outside).

The hang up is on the inside right? You have an essence to your consciousness experience that you believe a fly, bacteria, rock, computer, artificial neural network may or may not have.

Panpsychism does answer that question by saying yes, they all have some sliver of consciousness. Two atoms bumping together at some level experience the interaction.

I agree the theory doesn't have answers as to how or what the essence of consciousness is. But I definitely seeing it as a stepping stone towards that goal.

Simply answering a question with "Yes" without providing evidence or a deeper explanation seems pretty useless and like no additional knowledge was gained.

Pansychism seems to explain a lot of the hard questions. Even without a deeper understanding than 'there is a single conscious and you are a piece of it', simply thinking that way changes the understanding of life/death. You are unknowingly everyone. Punching a guy is on some level punching yourself. The afterlife is irrelevant, when you die you go on existing as the other 7 billion humans, plus animals, etc... This is why philosophers and neuroscientists alike a so excited about the idea and writing papers about it.

I'm curious, could you list the things that you think Anns can do that underpin your argument?

Well, that might just be because there's not actually much to say about consciousness. If you strip all the things we know it's not (memory, thoughts, etc) we're actually left with very little, if anything.

I think this is also what some meditation based philosophies are trying to teach. That is, they're saying something along the lines of: you are in one way everything at once, but you are not any of the things you think you are. They spend a lot of effort trying to teach people, essentially nothing. Not just the label "nothing" but something like a deep realisation of the concept.

My main problem with this philosophy is figuring out why we're conscious of a very specific subset of things at a time. Does the brain create a kind of nexus where several items of complex information are available in a small physical, and that makes it easy to be conscious of these things at once? But what limits it?

And the other problem is the link between consciousness and action. Most actions seem like a product of cause-and-effect.. but at the very least it seems that the existence of consciousness is making us talk about consciousness.

Even when you strip out those other concepts, which you probably shouldn't, there is an underlying element of conscious awareness that is not "nothing," but an awareness of nothing, like the "I" in "I think therefore I am."

My problem is that people confuse talking poetically about consciousness with actually coming to a conclusion about how this thing works.