> Reality tends to make sense, so if it's most likely impossible to make sense of consciousness by studying the brain, there's probably some other way to look at it.
Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver. Absent that, not so much. We're great at intuiting about ballistics in a gravitational field and atmosphere, less so about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse.
> The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience
What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of? If sense-organs and brains are somehow hard-epiphenomenal, not really required to experience the universe, why did organisms bother to evolve them?
Reality tends to make sense on scales and in environments where making sense of reality conferred an evolutionary advantage on the brain-haver. Absent that, not so much. We're great at intuiting about ballistics in a gravitational field and atmosphere, less so about WTF is happening in wavefunction collapse.
> The idea that fundamental particles like electrons have some kind of subjective experience
What would it be an experience of? Without sense-organs and brains or equivalents thereof, what could anything be conscious of? If sense-organs and brains are somehow hard-epiphenomenal, not really required to experience the universe, why did organisms bother to evolve them?