Graham,

I think both the physical and perception of it could be clarified more effectively than has been considered.

For one thing the concept of materialism assumes there is some quantified substance, be it atoms, quanta, strings, etc, from which the physical world emerges, yet all we seem to find is positive and negative charge, seemingly dancing around some equilibrium state, aka, the vacuum.

Then, as I keep pointing out, our past to future perception of time is an artifact of being mobile organisms, whose experience of their context is as a sequence of perceptions. While the evident reality is that time is an effect of the changing configuration of this quality called energy, such that future becomes past.

Which makes it similar to temperature, pressure, color and sound, rather than space.

With a wave, the energy drives it, while the fluctuations rise and fall, so the energy goes to the future, as the information goes to the past.

Given consciousness goes to the future, while perceptions, emotions and thoughts go to the past, it would seem consciousness functions as an energy. Though it is the gut and heart processing the energy, while the central nervous system sorts the information. Signals from the noise.

Then consider how we currently try explaining this physical reality. Does the fact we are very tactile creatures explain why we should view reality as fundamantally made up of physical objects? How deeply are the concepts of tools embedded in our psyche, that the manipulation of objects is how we've come to frame it? Tools become gods over time.

So my point isn't just trying to explain consciousness, but how our experience of it sets the frame from which we view everything else.

I grew up around more domestic animals, than people, mostly horses and cattle. As prey animals, they have their eyes set toward the sides of their faces, because simply being spatially aware is far more important than the singular focus that we, originating as tree swingers, then graduating to stick throwers, would need.

Our conscious state is basically the interface between our bodies and their environment. Being one track minded, we can only consceive consciousness as a function of the body, but what of the network in which the body exists?

We obsess over time, because sequence is fundamental to our experience as mobile organisms, but as I pointed out, it has more in common with temperature and pressure, than space, as an effect. We use ideal gas laws to correlate volume with temperature and pressure, but we have enough objectivity to recognize the relationship and not assume there is some fabric of spacetemperature.

Both are every bit as foundational to our emotions and bodily functions, as time is to our thought process.

The deeper reality is these thermodynamic feedback loops, than any linear progression of time. Yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights.

Galaxies are thermodynamic feedback loops, of energy radiating out, as information coalesces in.

There is no missing mass, there is just an excess of gravity, so if we considered mass as an effect of gravity, rather than gravity as a property of mass, it would be far more logical, because this inward curvature is causal, while mass as stable state, is effect. So the curve inward would start with photons coalescing out of the energy of light, the initial quantification. Remember energy drives the wave, while information coalescesinward, back to equilibrium and that starts with the most basic quantification. The bending of the light isn't caused by gravity, it is gravity.

The larger point being is that we still have much that can be cleared away, even before really trying to come to terms with the biological cause of this effect of consciousness.

A spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. That means peeling away the layers, not just connecting whatever loose ends we see. Otherwise it just becomes another version of epicycles.