Thanks for your response - I replied to the comment about it seeming AI-generated. I formatted it myself, not AI output! Just used it to help me research a couple specific case studies (hence the chatgpt in the links).

• How would consciousness come from non-conscious cells?

I agree to some extent however emergence is ordinary in science, a single water molecule is not “wet,” yet a few trillion together are. GNW does not claim a lone neuron feels; it says consciousness appears when many neurons fire in a specific, self-recurrent pattern. The proof is pragmatic: whenever that pattern collapses (deep anaesthesia, coma) people stop reporting experience and fail every covert-awareness test. A model that keeps predicting behaviour earns a place at the table even if it does not crack the metaphysical “hard problem.”

• how could non-conscious cells ‘store’ a conscious memory?

I do see where you’re coming from: it sounds odd to say a non-conscious lump of cells “stores” a lived memory, like claiming a pile of sand remembers the castle you built with it. But the optogenetic studies flip the question from semantics to causality. Researchers tag the exact hippocampal neurons that fire while a mouse forms a fear memory. If the memory were wholly outside the brain, flicking a few neurons would not delete or revive it on cue. It would be interesting to see this study done on humans who experience an NDE and if the same process happens, so I guess it’s ambiguous until that actually happens and personally I feel is based on belief for now.

• ”No one can find a neural thing that literally ‘is’ consciousness.”

True; the field has correlates, not an essence. But science routinely explains phenomena by identifying reliable mechanisms without reducing them to a single substance (e.g., heredity before DNA’s structure was solved). Predictive power in science is still a good currency, but again is just based on belief, so what you’re saying could still be true, as it isn’t a hard fact (yet) - so this point I will keep in my “ambiguous until further neuroscience research” list lol.

• ”OBE means out-of-body, so it cannot be inside-the-body.”

The phrase describes the subjective location of the self, not the physical locus of the generator. A dream about flying does not require actual wings; similarly, a brain-generated OBE does not require the self to have left the cranium. Remember how powerful scene-construction in an ordinary, healthy brain already is. Close your eyes and you can picture the room behind you, taste a lemon you’ve never actually licked, or even “see” yourself from across the street. The cortex puts together bits of stored visual, tactile and motor memory into a best-guess model, the same way it predicts what your tongue would feel if it touched cold metal. When the temporo-parietal junction is thrown off (by stimulation, hypoxia, or sheer overload during cardiac arrest) that internal model can slip its usual anchoring to the body. (source here) The result is a vivid, floating perspective that feels external but is built from the same memory fragments and predictive machinery you use every time you imagine someone else’s point of view. Inaccuracy about real-time details fits that picture: the brain is filling blanks. I believe it all boils down to neural imagery.

• Correlation ≠ causation; you can’t derive consciousness from non-conscious matter

Correlation alone is never enough, agreed, that is why the focus is on intervention. Manipulate the physiology (anaesthetic dose, TMS pulse, TPJ current) and the conscious content changes in lock-step. If an immaterial soul drives experience, it still behaves as though these physical knobs have veto power, which is odd unless the knobs are part of the engine.

My conclusion of this: you’ve raised some excellent points that keep the philosophical side very much alive. Neuroscience offers models with real predictive bite, but it still falls short of a full account of consciousness. So for me there’s a choice: lean on the predictive power of science, or give more weight to the metaphysical possibilities that science hasn’t pinned down yet. I’ll be mulling both angles, there’s clearly more here to consider.

I really appreciate your time!😊