[...] Western science has had some degree of success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the interior world of the mind, it has very little to say because there is still a lot that we don't know. [...] In a strange way, I think scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science.
Yes, set aside the experiential content of perceptions, thoughts, somatic sensations / feelings ... and all there is to consciousness is just information storage, the outward actions / responses of the body, and the functional, micro-physical relationships of the brain and nervous system that produce the former. Such mechanistic interactions are fundamental and found throughout the universe (albeit far less organized processes). So in that context there's little unique about consciousness but the specialized purposes those operations integrate up into at the performance level of a human body dealing with its environment and internal data manipulation. No wholly radical, new category emerges that transcends or does not fall out of spatial connections (entities with measurable properties constituting extended structure and engaging in motion / change).
"Intrinsic states" are actually interpersonal rather than entirely subjective. That is, Anglophone-speaking people that are minus detracting clinical conditions should know and agree on what the qualitative meanings of blue, rotten egg odor, headache pain, high-pitched noise, etc correspond to phenomenally. But nevertheless, scientific explanations are much confined to extracting complex accounts of extrinsic linkages and quantitative elements (from our experiences) which can then be publicly evaluated better. Once those "external states" and any appended abstract furniture have been fully determined, then the reasons / causes behind "____" occurring are taken to be completed. In as far as natural methodology can investigate, which in turn philosophical stance-wise, also considers itself to be the sole available approach.
We still do not exactly know how all that electro-chemical activity in the physical matter of our brain ever give rise to conscious experience? And why doesn't all this information processing just go on in the dark?
Even mental experiences which frustrate physicalism (the "hard problem") at least have or potentially have correlates in regard to neural "firing" patterns; and perhaps structures within individual cells -- if one tosses in Penrose / Hameroff speculations, etc. The mystery of those manifestations (as opposed to the usual nothingness of non-consciousness material) rests in a lack of anything more primal being posited about matter and its relationships from which that facet of consciousness could arise. Accordingly, the embarrassment of a brute type of emergence occurring at a higher stratum than quantum fluctuation affairs. Although a variety of biological, computer / information, social science and philosophical ventures might either hypothesize or unspokenly assume proto-phenomenal attributes are the case on a global scale (so as to undermine this appearance of "magical conjuring"), their vague suppositions will probably amount to phlogiston in the end if they fail to impress physics or nudge an addition / modification to transpire therein.
Does our brain really create consciousness?
If the "brain" and nervous system are just exhibited representations and technical linguistic descriptions of some "independent of all minds" cause (evidence of existence instead of existence itself), then of course that's just another set of items abstracted from the empirical world that consciousness yields (as opposed to the nothingness of whatever literal style of be-ing they try to signify). But this is still no detriment to methodological naturalism, since the operating assumption is that phenomena (both in the everyday and the scientific realism sense), are inter-dependent; they are relational origins of each other, a causally closed system.
For instance, a computer game society of characters could still utilize the governing "internal principles" of its manifested virtual reality to manipulate that experienced environment. The fact that they might have no access to the transcendent provenance of their "more territory generated upon need" cosmos -- i.e., the hidden computer, which is just a metaphor for this era -- does not mean, again, that there would be no satisfactory and effective internal explanations for events. (Barring the problem of experience.)
