The funny part being that they write it as if the ideas are preposterous. Putting religion at the very basis of the operation of the universe is one hell of a drug.
EDIT: Already made it a comment, but I feel it's important before people get that idea that these people are necessarily our enemies.
People write/read takes like this and come to radically different conclusions due to their different base axioms of human experience. For the target readership of catholicculture.org, they are ones that are trying to understand the universe, with the base assumption being the existence of a Christian god. Many an apologetic has attempted to synthesize the real observable world with a just, righteous god. Regardless of their flawed logics, they are at least interested in taking a holistic approach to the human experience rather than an individual, capitalist, exploitative experience. As someone who as a child dove into the catholic theological worldview, desperate for meaning in this clearly meaning deprived society, these people can be radicalized, and are capable of changing their basis of thought. It takes real effort and patience, but they are much more likely to be a devoted comrade to the human liberatory unification experience than a bourgeois hedonistic individualist, who only cares for themselves and the people closest to them, who would rather not ponder their experience let alone the collective human experience, but rather live their own lives in pursuit of illusory happiness in isolation.
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You can look inside the eye though. Can you look inside consciousness? You can look inside the brain, but that's not the same thing. It's possible that a complete physical description of the brain will not allow us to understanding consciousness.
Why should the limits of human intelligence determine whether something is a physical process? Why would we assume that some artificial or alien intelligence of arbitrary complexity would never be able to understand it? The question I would ask is whether it would be possible to take a physical description of the system, and create another system with the same physical description that does not have "consciousness". If there isn't evidence of this, or of a mechanism where it would be possible, I don't see why we should say that consciousness is anything outside of materialism.
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Well that's just the thing. We don't have a scientific explanation of the subjective experience of vision, just the physiological function of the eye.
In order to call our understanding of consciousness scientific, we would at least be able to say which physical processes produce conscious experience and why. Like why does an eye produce a sensation of seeing? What is special about the function of an eye? It's just a physical object.
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Physical descriptions of neurons are complete without consciousness though. As you said, we can simulate that stuff on a computer. It's just a physical electromagnetic process like any other. It runs on the same physics as your computer. So where does consciousness come in? It appears to be something which does not actually affect the function of that neural hardware in your brain, it just sort of follows your brain's every move.
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Would it though? How would you even check? If consciousness is physics, then we should be able to measure something about it or at least verify its existence using methods that work for other physical phenomena, right? If all we can measure are it's physical correlates, then it isn't physics, it's something parallel to physics.
Ok, I think that's a very valid point. Maybe the traditional way of thinking about physical ontology is just ass-backwards and creates a purely illusory problem.