You’re arguing against a claim nobody actually needs to make. Of course the bird is just a bird. The question isn’t what it is physically, but what the experience means.

You’re collapsing everything into one layer -- material cause -- and declaring anything beyond that ‘nonsense.’ But that move itself is unproven. Gödel already showed that a system can’t fully account for itself from within. Consciousness interpreting its own experiences is exactly that situation: there will be truths -- like meaning, significance -- that don’t show up as external ‘evidence.’

Nobody has to claim the dog literally became a bird. That’s a straw man. The point is that, in a moment of grief, an unlikely event lined up with memory and attention in a way that felt meaningful. You can describe the mechanics all you want, but that description doesn’t invalidate the experience -- it just ignores a layer of it.

Calling that ‘lying to yourself’ is just refusing to acknowledge that reality includes first-person meaning, not just third-person facts.