[garmaine]

I never said there was broad consensus among all philosophers and physicists, etc. It takes generations for these ideas to truly die, just as it did with other widely believed falsehoods. No one really attacked consciousness from a mechanistic perspective until Turing, and that work wasn't followed up on outside of the AI community until the 70's and 80's, and it wouldn't be until very recent advances in AI that others took these philosophical ideas originating from computer science seriously.

So in the philosophy of physics and the mind, there are whole departments filled with tenured professors who came of age in their thinking at a time when consciousness was a Hard Problem, and have focused their mental tools on a class of solutions (qualia, observer-triggered wave collapse, etc.) which are irreconcilable with mechanistic physical reality, making the problem even more intractable and mysterious. It'll take another generation or two before the ideas of Dennett, Dawkins, Tegmark, etc. get more widely recognized and consciousness finally goes the way of phlogiston.

For references, I recommend Dennett's "Consciousness Explained", and really anything by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins--materialistic explanations of consciousness pervade their work. For a compatible (hah!) physical perspective, I suggest Max Tegmark:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219

[Others]

I feel like this is a bit of an oversimplification of a complicated topic. For example, qualia is not a solution, it's a problem! And while Dennett does present an interesting picture (especially in the way he resolves qualia), there is a reason his book is nicknamed "Consciousness Explained Away" -- he simply defines away many of the interesting parts of the problem.

Also, I don't really like the way you're describing these professors of philosophy. These people have spent their lives studying this problem and adjacent topics. Sure you may be absolutely convinced that "things that conflict with our understanding of mechanistic physical reality must be untrue," others believe "what almost all people perceive to be true about their internal experience cannot be dismissed when discussing the nature of that experience." I think this topic is much more debatable than you are making it out to be.

[friendlybus]

The phlogiston is an elegant argument in this context that regresses the discussion. The use of the phlogiston as a criticism is elegant because it allows you to think of consciousness as an element that inhabits the brain and then proclaim that to be wrong, leaving at the end of the story only the physical brain and no room for imagining anything else in that space, without having proven the case.

A phlogiston is not the correct analogy for grounding consciousness in science. An easier fit would be the software/hardware split you find in computing, where the abstractions and meaning we perceive to be real is a set of built layers of computational or logical abstraction.

I am on the side of not thinking you can scientifically ground consciousness with the understanding we have. I don't think either analogy fits and the argument will forever be pinned in debate between characters that prefer their own worldview.