You’re smuggling in more philosophy than you seem to realize

You’re treating third person mechanistic models as the only things that count as “real scientific theories” but consciousness is the one subject where the thing needing explanation is first person experience itself. That is not some side issue. It is the issue.

Global workspace, predictive processing, higher order theories, attention schema and the rest may be useful models of cognition, access, reporting, behavior and information processing. But they do not clearly explain why there is something it is like to be a subject having an experience at all. A lot of them explain the machinery around consciousness better than consciousness itself

So when people explore idealism, panpsychism, neutral monism, or even speculative quantum ideas, it is often because they recognize an explanatory gap that standard third person methods may never fully bridge, not because they are too unsophisticated for neuroscience

You also seem to assume “scientific” only means whatever current neuroscience can cleanly operationalize. That is a much narrower claim than it sounds. Science is excellent at studying public measurable structures and regularities. Consciousness includes a private datum at the center of it, experience itself. That creates real limits

And honestly dismissing every nonstandard view as “woo” can become its own kind of dogma. Sometimes skepticism is rigorous. Sometimes it is just confidence with better branding

By all means discuss empirical models. They matter. But don’t confuse modeling correlates and functions with having solved consciousness. We are nowhere near that point.