There are plenty of entirely worthwhile and interesting areas of research in philosophy. This is not one of them.<p>It is entirely sufficient to understand that brains are composed of physical elements - neurons and the like, that communicate with each other with little electrical and chemical signals, and that this physical state evolves forwards with time according to physical laws. I repeat, this is all that is required to resolve <i>every single one</i> of these supposed &quot;problems&quot; of consciousness.<p>We may not understand how a brain works in its entirety, but knowing that its behaviour is entirely described by these physical pieces bounds our understanding of its behaviour as a whole sufficiently that these problems are trivially revealed to be specious nonsense.<p>As an analogy, I know that the microchip in my computer is built out of transistors etched onto a silicon die. I have some knowledge about microchip design, broadly speaking, and I know about things such as logic circuits, latches and clock signals, but I don&#x27;t possess a complete understanding of how it functions. Still, knowing that it&#x27;s just transistors bounds my understanding of its behaviour. I know, for instance, that there&#x27;s no extra-physical magic pixie that makes it function. I don&#x27;t wonder about the subjective experience of the floating point unit, or about whether the L1 cache is <i>feeling</i> or just <i>registering</i> the data it stores, or whether it would be <i>possible</i> or just <i>concievable</i> for a world to exist where an atom-for-atom identical processor didn&#x27;t actually <i>compute</i> but just went through the motions of moving about some little electrical impulses.<p>On a fundamental level, our brains are very much the same. The architecture is nothing at all alike, for example: the clock speeds and signal propagation rates are much lower, synaptic signals are at least partly analog, the brain doesn&#x27;t have anything remotely close to a uniform memory space, and it continuously dynamically reconfigures itself through neuroplasticity. None of this is relevant. I did not conclude there is not a magic pixie making making my computer&#x27;s CPU function because of my understanding of it&#x27;s architecture and overall design, I concluded it because I know it&#x27;s made up of transistors, and it&#x27;s behaviour is entirely described by its transistors, and no matter how hard you try you can&#x27;t make a magic pixie out of transistors.<p>We have established that brains are made up of little physical pieces and obey physical laws. It trivially follows that every piece of data that could possible be referred to as part of our consciousness, every &quot;feeling&quot; or &quot;subjective experience&quot; is just some pattern or another entirely described by the physical state of the brain.<p>If you see some sort of problem with this, if you see some sort of contradiction in the understanding that &quot;you&quot; are just a wetware-implemented algorithm that is the end result of a rather convoluted process of natural evolution and human development, that is a problem with your understanding not with reality. There is no space in this picture for looking at some pattern of neural impulses and asking whether it <i>feels</i>; you can answer that question however you like, but with respect to reality that question is not even wrong.<p>David Chalmers would call this &quot;materialism&quot; or perhaps &quot;physicalism&quot;. Once you move past Solipsism and decide that reality actually exists, or that we don&#x27;t know that reality actually exists but it seems to so we might as well assume it does for the sake of argument, then, though this is actually a tautology, every physical thing physically exists. The problem with words such as &quot;materialism&quot; and &quot;physicalism&quot; is that using the word implies things could be any other way. There are abstract ideas, and there is reality - &quot;that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn&#x27;t go away&quot;. While I might respect a position such as solipsism as epistemologically valid, beyond that particular loophole I cannot understand why philosophers who do not agree with what is generally called &quot;empirical materialism&quot; are taken seriously.