Very enjoyable article. You hit on some great points.
Here are some things that jumped out at me...
• “Consciousness is somehow dependent on the brain but is nowhere to be found in or near neurons…”
— Consciousness is only dependent upon the brain to communicate and experience through a body and the world in which the body is located.
• I tend to disagree with this: “…lifeless physical things have no conscious interior, which means that most of what exists is estranged from us in that nonliving things are launched on independent courses.”
— This gets into how we define consciousness. Is it limited to the awareness of so-called living, or sentient, beings, or does it include the totality of all existence? I use the word according to the latter definition. Can we know what a rock experiences? I would say that a rock, fire, or water has an impulse to be. This doesn’t mean that it thinks about its purpose in this world or differentiates itself from others. It suggests that there is an energetic impulse for it to be what it is as an expression of consciousness.
• “Our conscious self is precious to us because we evolved to be self-interested,…”
— I agree. The self is self-centered, selfish, egocentric, and all-important, which is why it is always seeking security and pleasure while also trying to avoid pain and suffering.
• “Our body’s senses receive information which our brain transduces into a neural format we can process, and somehow the product of that process registers as a conscious state…”?
— Can we limit who we are by this statement?
There are states in which the self exists and the senses sense that are not in a physical body, speaking from my experience. And this has confounded materialists, including physicians, who have tried to explain near-death and out of body experiences as well as altered states in which information out of reach of the physical body has been “brought back” and recounted.
•”Does our consciousness thereby merge with something else, or do we merely pretend as much, when the largesse of our imagination enables us to empathize with someone else’s plight, or to treat something else as ours so that we can focus on conquering more territory?”
— This is something that some people know the answer to, and it’s something that physicists have touched upon with their explanation of a unified field (Einstein) and an implicate order (Bohm). However, I would agree that the latter part of your sentence is also true for a great many people — perhaps most.
• “…consciousness isn’t miraculous since we know it emerges from the brain…”
Consciousness is expressed by the brain but is not an artifact of the brain.
• “Death for everything that’s organically born is the hallmark of an absurd cosmic plenum that wildly tries on all forms only to discard them all for no good reason.”
— It is only the self that cares about a reason or purpose
