Sorry if this isn't nearly as comprehensive as your reply,, I only have so much time to spread around, but I do appreciate the olive branch, so thanks for that too.

However - I think that same acknowledgement should, simultaneously, recognize that while we’ve kind of… “mapped the shores of the lake called consciousness” through the last hundred years of research and advancements, we still fundamentally understand very little. Y’know?

Briefly I think that is our major disconnect. Because my perspective on the state of the cognitive research and investigating the physical mechanistic basis of our awareness is that we have barely even begun to scratch the surface, even after decades of chipping away at it, but the little we have seen under the surface looks promising. So to me it isn't an obvious necessity to start looking elsewhere yet to explain the consciousness we experience.

To maybe make the metaphor even more convoluted, from a materialist perspective of understanding the brain, we've opened a handful of doors and found a few fragments of what might be the answer to consciousness, but I can still see far more doors still unopened, lining a corridor I that can't even see the end of. And I'm more about getting down that hallway and opening the rest of the doors first, before we start digging up the foundations looking for the rest of the answer.