[beesmum]

While I think it's an interesting argument, I don't agree that accepting that some other being than me can be conscious leads to having to accept the physical origin of consciousness a priori. If you look at Buddhism or any esoteric system, they essentially posit that consciousness is a unified field from which everything manifests, like light refracted through an (infinitely) complex array of lens. The spots of light where the light terminates look separate, but if you look at where the source of the light enters the lens, it all comes from a single source. The experience of having a separate consciousness and a body or mind or thoughts that I identify as me or an I that is not you or that car or that tree is essentially just an illusion because I don't have the awareness to be conscious of that unity. Just because something appears to be separate from one perspective doesn't mean that it's separate in reality, it's just that I experience it as separate due to my limited perspective. Consciousness is an experiential vehicle by nature. It doesn't slot into the scientific method all that well no matter how we try to cram it in.

[perl4ever]

Are you or are you not experiencing my consciousness right now? Either you claim to, in which case you're lying or delusional, or you don't claim to, in which case you can't say anything about its experiential nature without contradiction. I can say I am conscious all day, but that's just something I say - it can't prove anything to you. If I was being tortured, and I didn't communicate it to you, would you notice?

Logical incoherence starts with lying to yourself. That's not wisdom.

Edit: I can be a solipsist today and a materialist tomorrow - I'm not criticizing either viewpoint, just saying you can't reason based on believing in both simultaneously.

[beesmum]

I think you capture what I was referring to when I said that limited awareness is what narrows consciousness -- it's like putting some of the ocean in a bucket. It's still part of the ocean, but it's not the whole ocean. What do logic and labels like solipsist and materialist have to do with consciousness? Yes, they're part of consciousness, but they're a construct: concepts and words that we're using to discuss our own unique experiences of consciousness. We can chase each other around forever in a rabbit hole of semantics about what the nature of consciousness is, and how my experience varies and is separate from your experience of it, but we're just looking at our buckets of water that we scooped up as if it's the entirety of the ocean. Meanwhile, the ocean is sloshing around us. It doesn't rely on us to be aware of it's oceanness to exist, it just is. Consciousness has more than enough space to accommodate your experience that relies very heavily on logical coherence to form a version of reality that is comfortable for you to function in, but that experiential frame isn't the ground of all being. It's just a lens that one can look through. Sure, I can't share you're exact experience, but I could empathize with you if I knew you were tortured. You can look through one lens and then another: consciousness is constantly changing and modulating our experiences, there's nothing static about it.