The reverse can also be true, with John Keats' agreeing with Charles Lamb that Newton "had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia_(poem)

If we should ever fully understand how our own minds work, will we hold machines in higher esteem, or ourselves in lower?

Any biology or physics that suggests humans are just a pattern recognizer will be discarded as us being a conscious being is the only thing every human knows to be 100% true.

So, all of biology and physics then. If souls exist, they have no mass, and have a weird way of being repeatably disrupted in consistent ways by damage to certain parts of the brain or specific chemicals.

Just because consciousness is a mystery today, doesn't mean we get to stop and say it will be so forever more.

Heck, the problem still fundamentally exists regardless of if you're atheist, monotheist, polytheist, or pantheist.

--

“We’re not listening to you! You’re not even really alive!” said a priest.

Dorfl nodded. “This Is Fundamentally True,” he said.

“See? He admits it!”

“I Suggest You Take Me And Smash Me And Grind The Bits Into Fragments And Pound The Fragments Into Powder And Mill Them Again To The Finest Dust There Can Be, And I Believe You Will Not Find A Single Atom Of Life–”

“True! Let’s do it!”

“However, In Order To Test This Fully, One Of You Must Volunteer To Undergo The Same Process.”

There was silence.

“That’s not fair,” said a priest, after a while. “All anyone has to do is bake up your dust again and you’ll be alive…”

- Feet of Clay, Terry Pratchett

You missed the entire point. Physics and biology exist to help humans understand the material universe. Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever, or lack agency, is wrong since all of physics and biology are an offshoot of that agency meant to enrich it.

I'm not missing the point, I'm saying you're wrong. There's a difference.

Also:

> Anything supposing that humans aren’t actually intelligent or conscious or whatever

Doesn't really match what I was writing about: if it turns out that a thing which is "just a pattern recognizer" can in fact be "intelligent or conscious or whatever", it's up to us if we see intelligence or consciousness or whatever in the pattern recognisers that we build, or if we ourselves descend into solipsism and/or nihilism.

Or if we take the traditional path of sticking our fingers in our ears and go "la la la I'm not listening" by way of managing cognitive dissonance. This is a very popular response which should not be underestimated.

But the laws of physics are quite clear, that a whole bunch of linear equations (quantum field theory) gets us chemistry, which gets us biology, etc., and the only place in all this for the feeling of existence that we have is emergent properties. Those emergent properties may, or may not, be present in other systems, but we don't know because we're really bad at characterising how emergent properties… emerge.