Hi Pru,

I'm sorry for not making the submarine analogy as clear as I should have:

The crew produces the consciousness of the submarine. And brain cells produce the consciousness of the human.

I think it's potentially possible that sparks flowing through the brain can create an experience of consciousness, because the brain creates visual experience that way already -- something we're very familiar with, and take for granted -- or at least primitive visual experience like in other animals.

In other words, much of our mental activity is miraculous. Consciousness is arguably only a little more miraculous. If the brain can do the simple stuff, why can't it also be doing the hard stuff?

After all, we can mostly accept life as emerging from biochemical functions, and don't look for a non-physical element (like "elan"). Also, we can accept evolution as something that can happen naturally versus requiring intelligent design -- and also that there COULD be intelligent design controlling nature and evolution.

Like with religion or other supernatural or mystic thought, I don't think either theory can be proven or disproven, and just prefer to follow Occam's razor in terms of what I believe.

After all, science has provided physical explanations for many things once considered supernatural. Why preclude the possibility that they will eventually explain consciousness?

By the way, I tend to NOT believe we will ever have technology for one person to enter another person's consciousness, or to create a human-level consciousness from scratch.

Thank you for reading and commenting. I hope all is well.