&gt;<i>Magical thinking is believing a ball of meat can create something as profound as consciousness.</i><p>Reducing the complexities of the brain to &quot;a ball of meat&quot; is absurd. That&#x27;s like saying it&#x27;s magical thinking to suggest that a fragment of silicon can predict the weather.<p>Further, there isn&#x27;t any reason to believe that consciousness is any more profound or fundamentally distinct from any other physical phenomenon in the universe, <i>especially</i> because consciousness is a prerequisite to the consideration of its own nature; such reasoning is akin to thinking that the universe must have been carefully designed because it&#x27;s so perfectly tuned to the temperament of complex life, when there&#x27;s literally no other possibility if life actually exists to wonder about why it&#x27;s here.