What is it like to be a bat?

Materialism (perhaps physicalism as well) appears to be on shaky ground to me - it does not tell me 'why' I have the first person experience that I have, why I experience and embody the matter that is my person or being, a specific entity. Another way to look at it is to say there doesn't appear to be a region in the brain that defines why I experience the brain, that or this specific brain. From this perspective, I find it self-refuting. They appear only to locate or correlate matter and experience - to help explain 'how'. If I could experience other persons or beings in the first person, and the matter in each person explained why it is that I experience that specific person or entity, I might believe otherwise. To me, this simple fact makes it obvious there is something 'more' that must explain how 'being' relates to consciousness, otherwise, we are simply explaining how the brain modulates experience - very valuable, but less interesting and within reach and validated in everyday life (biochemically and physically, degeneration, damage, etc.). So I would say the brain appears to modulate what is responsible for first person experience. This may not be the correct way to look at consciousness, but it's the most intuitively appealing to me. Because we can't separate being from consciousness, I find the idea that we might create it in the near-term unbelievable. We might certainly create something that can operate with the same or similar results, but I'm not currently convinced it would actually have a subjective first person experience equivalent to the reason we experience the matter we experience. There may be a logical or philosophical way around this view, but as I'm not trained, it's not immediately obvious.

Materialism is indeed on shaky ground, but the ground shakes everywhere else, too.

The problem of consciousness has no real solution. A quick way to demonstrate this is via the simulation hypothesis. Consider the following for yourself in first person:

It's impossible to know for certain whether I am in a simulation until I wake up outside of it. Not having observed any evidence of being inside a simulation (probability=0) doesn't necessarily mean I'm certainly in base reality. It could be that the evidence just hasn't been observed yet. And even then, it's impossible to know whether that outer world is a simulation until I wake up in the outer-outer-world, and so on.

That is to say, if my definition of real equals my consciousness equals my existence, I'm really saying that consciousness/reality/existence is a self-defining thing.

Descartes' cogito had unexamined metaphysical convictions. "I think, therefore I am" is not compatible with consciousness because rationality has consciousness as a dependency. If I think back on my entire conscious experience as a timeline, I was conscious before I was rational. I had to derive rationality from experience, not the other way around.

Now I throw away those convictions. "I think" means the same thing as "I am", and "therefore" is a decorative force of habit rather than a reference to logic. In which case, "I think, therefore I am" is the same as: I observe that I observe.

Is the same as: I observe.

Is the same as: I am.

There is no certainty beyond this, only convictions. Even if I'm truly a human brain in a matter-based world, the world would still appear uncertain to this brain in this way.

"A scientist rejecting consciousness is not that different from a nun accepting god in this regard. Neither of them are fully honest with themselves and the world."

That's what I find myself thinking as I take a materialist stance and assume that this is base reality and other people are real in the same way that I am. This appears to fit all of my observations the best, so far, after all.

// end of monologue

And here's my pitch, from me to you:

Let's be provisional materialists together. You can't know if it's the ultimate truth but you can make the correct predictions more often and not be alone while doing it.