Your whole logic is based on materialistic principles. You seem to be looking for a physical "cord" linking us to a physical "place" where consciousness "happens". You can't consider what I'm hinting if you stay in that paradigm.

What if your base assumptions are flawed ? The current materialistic approach is based on flawed 15th century intuitions. Just like the previous assumptions were based on other flawed intuitions (gold can be made from any element, stars are on crystal spheres, earth is the center of the universe, &c.)

What makes you think our current assumptions are the absolute truth ?

An example of how it could happen is: - the material universe is a simulation/mechanism that is taking place in a higher level universe with unknown properties. - conscious processes are associated with that higher level. - the "wetware" aspects of consciousness as neural software in the brain are not fundamental and/or are maintained as part of the simulation.

I can tell you definitively that even if there is a simulation, it doesn't treat the brain specially and differently from any other matter in the (in our) universe. the brain has no special properties. it is not a radio into a higher level universe. it's just stuff, same as all the other stuff. no shenanigans, I guarantee it for you.

I don't believe it's possible to be definitive about such matters. The way I interpret your "definitive" is "I very much believe this to be so." That is well and good, but I do not.

Consider the fact that brain damage can change a person's personality. That strikes me as a powerful indication that there is not a higher level on which the consciousness lives with an interface to the wetware.

hey God here, just a note that I did put a small radio in everyone's brain for communicating with higher dimensions that mere physics can never touch. When this radio gets damaged, it falls back to 802.11n, and this slower connectivity is what causes the changes in behavior and personality. It's basically a connectivity issue. No, the processing isn't going on in the brain, but you still need a good, fast connection to the soul realm and at the moment the only way to do that is with the consciousness organ I designed. the brain is basically a thin client and the soul organ is the network card. hope this heps.

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okay so now what are the chances that I'm God and really just said that? If you said anything over 0.00000000% you're totally wrong. There is no chance of that because it's stupid. the above paragraph is obviously satire, because it's stupid.

Your opinions here are very arrogant. You are presuming that lack of evidence is proof of a negative. Pretty sure that so far outside of the scientific method that it's as much quackery as homeopathic "medicine"

You are presuming that the physical is all there is to existence. You fail to consider the possibility that there are portions of reality that we don't have the physical capability to perceive or the mental capability to truly understand.

There's a difference between saying "there is no evidence of X" versus "there is no evidence of X, so X is impossible"

what do you put the chances at that there's a soul organ in the brain that acts like a radio into a soul dimension, where consciousness occurs? (rather than as an emergent property of the matter, with the brain being no different than any other matter in our Universe.)

I estimate 0.00000000%. What's your estimate?

I estimate that there is a non-zero chance that consciousness itself is something we will never truly understand. Would you ever expect a piece of software to be able to truly understand the things that drive its actual consciousness, should we ever figure out how to create truly sentient AI? I don't honestly think one could, without speaking directly to their creator. And since the existence of a creator of human consciousness is purely a thing of speculation, I don't see us ever being able to do such a thing (should they exist) until we pass through what we know as death. At that point, I feel that there's a non-zero chance that our consciousness does indeed continue on in some form of existence. What that form is, where it resides, or if it even has physical properties, I don't know, and I don't think we'll ever know, until we cross the threshold of death as individuals.

I feel that consciousness itself is something non-physical. Whether it be a specific cocktail of neurotransmitters working in concert to give us the characteristics that we attribute to sentience, or a "core" form of existence that exists outside of our physical existence, I don't know, and I don't presume to know. I also don't presume I should be going around and acting like I can say with complete authority and accuracy "X doesn't exist in any way, shape, or form, because there is no evidence". I mean, what of the many other "scientific facts" humans have revised and subsequently rejected over a few millennia?

I don't object to what you've just written. I expect even if we had conscious robots that we programed with AI software and which are connected to sensors and aware of themselves (similar to boston dynamics humanoid and dog-like robots, if we also add in a large neural software brain), having them be conscious by obvious virtue of running software we developed/coded/used genetic algorithms on, wouldn't mean we understand that consciousness.

I'd say we would have the chance to have a much better understanding of that type of consciousness than we would our own, unless such an AI were to come about spontaneously from a long string of machine learning such that we don't have any clue about the inner machinations.