Let's suppose consciousness comes from the gurganath. The gurganath is a metaphysical being that is not made of matter or any substance we can understand. It h

Let's suppose consciousness comes from the gurganath. The gurganath is a metaphysical being that is not made of matter or any substance we can understand. It has a big belly. And when it slaps its belly in either anger or glee, a side effect is that whole universes full of conscious beings come into being, experience a few billions of years in subjective time, them annihilate themselves. That's consciousness as a metaphysical epiphenomenon of the gurganath. Or consider the Squigloog. The Squigloog is a "sensorial bundle" - an abstract collection of all possible sense experiences - including conscious ones. It is a static and unchanging construct existing outside of time or space. Although time does not pass for the Squigloog, it encodes all possible experiences including ones where the subject appears to experience time. That's consciousness if it were supported by the Squigloog. The first theory is akin to theism - the gurganath is basically God. The second theory is similar to Hume's Bundle Theory. Although I am mainly a materialist for pragmatic reasons, these are non-material theories of consciousness. There is no way for me to falsify either of them. And there may be no way to prove that material is the cause of consciousness. So I would say that we should be tolerant of people who have non-materialist theories of consciousness. Even if they're not very tolerant of materialists. Any one of us could be right.