>But consciousness is by definition a non-material phenomenon, so that's the wrong approach.
Going back to this: I'm not even sure what this means. If you assume you can't understand consciousness through material means then you've simply defined yourself into a paradox. This is an uninteresting and unscientific take and it gets us exactly nowhere.
It's pretty obvious that consciousness does not exist in any singular unit in the brain (we probably would have found it by now otherwise). Consciousness is a property of some non-trivial subset of the units of the brain--at least this is what our current understanding leads us to believe (consciousness is within the brain and its not any singular unit). To characterize this as "non-material" again is a presumption that is not warranted.
Your only reason for treating the substance of consciousness as something non-material is because you simply can't imagine that a first-person experience could be derived from material processes. There is no reason to think this at all.
Going back to this: I'm not even sure what this means. If you assume you can't understand consciousness through material means then you've simply defined yourself into a paradox. This is an uninteresting and unscientific take and it gets us exactly nowhere.
It's pretty obvious that consciousness does not exist in any singular unit in the brain (we probably would have found it by now otherwise). Consciousness is a property of some non-trivial subset of the units of the brain--at least this is what our current understanding leads us to believe (consciousness is within the brain and its not any singular unit). To characterize this as "non-material" again is a presumption that is not warranted.
Your only reason for treating the substance of consciousness as something non-material is because you simply can't imagine that a first-person experience could be derived from material processes. There is no reason to think this at all.