[smokedetector1]

I commend your diligence, your theory may even be internally consistent, but I don't see why I should believe this rather than the comparatively simple and intuitively true (to me, anyway) notion that there is a genuine soul, it has its own volition, and it certainly interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently (and may always be) mysterious.

[visarga]

What you say that the soul acts like a homunculus, "interacts with the physical body and brain through a link that is currently mysterious". It is a "center" thing that has volition, and semantics, and is genuine.

And it is understandable to do so. It certainly feels unified, and genuine. And it is simple and nice to be so. But intuition fails us hard when it comes to introspection. We feel alive, and conscious, but we are a few billion neurons connected by trillion branches, all wrapped in a bio-robot, put inside a complex environment full of living things in a state of cooperation and competition.

[smokedetector1]

Again, that is your theory. Just because you've created it using the primitives of materialist science doesn't mean it's true or that it's more likely than another theory. The fact is there's no scientific basis for believing what you've said. There just isn't.

If it feels like there's a scientific basis for what you're saying, that's because you're invoking the metaphysical principle of strict materialism, which is a common (though not inherently valid) way of thinking about science, and if that were true then yes, something like your theory would have to be true.

But be clear - that is not something proven by science, it is an axiom that is far from obviously true or universally accepted.

It may also feel that your theory should be true because so much about how the body and brain works is, I agree, materialist in nature, so why not hypothesize that everything is materialist? But that is very much a hypothesis and an intuition, not something that is scientifically proven or logically forced. And, as you say, intuition can be flawed.