Thanks Steve, I appreciate the opportunity to engage on these questions with you in the respectful manner you show.
Responding to the consciousness and “in principle” question, I would suggest that science has taken the route of demonstrating that consciousness, if it exists at all, is an accidental and evolutionary meaningless thing that emerges from matter and forces. I would also suggest that leaders in this field, such as Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, are finding that impossible to show without appeal to something scientists would call “supernatural” that is panpsychism. Appealing to consciousness as an intrinsic property of matter does not fit the physicalist story. Koch, you may recall, partnered with Francis Crick who set about the task of finding the neural correlates of consciousness and has been a leader in the neuroscience you reference. While they have found much in the way of correlates, as we know, correlation is not causation and David Chalmers has pointed out the effort the two of them have made in the past to conflate the two. Further, Koch had his own mystical experience in a sensory deprivation tank, and commented that studies of mystical experiences by neuroscience show that the neural functions almost cease to exist in these conditions despite the experience being among the most vivid and “real” of any human experience. It caused him to comment that this realization undermines his preferred explanation for consciousness which is Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory or IIT. Interesting as well is Tononi’s strong belief in pansychism and his comment that given the theory of IIT the United States itself is a conscious entity. I think we have gone beyond reasonable science here.
You are of course right that science is about converting the things once considered supernatural into natural. The question then is: is anything beyond the boundaries of physical matter and forces. You say no, I say yes. You also say science has no limits, or self-limits. I pointed to an interesting article by Connor Wood: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/scienceonreligion/2021/08/faith-and-the-evolutionary-predicament/
There are phenomena studied by many scientists that do not fit the physicalist mode. The whole area of psi is discounted as impossible and imaginary, despite significant evidence that it is not. I point you for one simple example to the work of Dr. Sam Parnia. All the studies of Jung, James, Meyers, and others have been discounted for the simple reason they do not fit the physicalist model.
One final comment, you say that science will find the answer to everything given enough time. Scientists once thought nature was made up of four elements that could be rearranged to turn base metal into noble metal. Science cannot find the answers to solutions that are impossible. It seems clear to me and many others that the self-limiting paradigm of physicalism is false premise that is hindering scientists from answering some of our deepest mysteries.
