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
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.
