In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniq

In my experience all those "consciousness is otherworldly magic" people are at least heavily influenced (1) by the religious interpretation of the "magical uniqueness" of the humans compared to the all other living beings. Wishful thinking. Then comes the "free will" and other also "magical" thinking. Especially easy to sell in the US (2) And we aren't made of anything other than what all the animals are made of, and the underlying processes in our brains aren't physically unique. And there's no "spirit" or "soul" needed to explain anything. The word spirit comes from Latin spiritus "breath." Ditto for the term for soul "psyche" which comes from the ancient Greek psykhe with the original meaning "breath." That's all that "leaves us" when we die (as we "have our last breath") and from where all the magical thinking came. The consciousness is just a product of evolution, and "a kind of self awareness" exists by animals too. Not much different from what we observe by ourselves, and actually of direct evolutionary advantage. More about all that: http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness-is-just-a-consequence-of-evolution http://www.vice.com/read/sorry-religions-human-consciousness... http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html http://www.livescience.com/26338-crabs-feel-pain.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-lets-bury-it.html http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/01/free-will-is-dead-l... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World --- 1) if themselves not explicitly declared believers or at least philosophers, the latter having all the incentives to mystify the topic and stay away from the hard sciences 2) 4 of 10 in the US believe "that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-human-origins.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...