Is consciousness part of the fabric of the universe?

> 1, solipsism, has the advantage that there is a solid argument to be made for it - I only have direct access to my own mind. That is why I am calling it coherent.

In saying that, you are assuming certain standards for judging whether an argument is "solid". How do you justify those standards? Many would answer that they are axiomatic. But, if our standards for judging arguments are ultimately axiomatic, why can't the existence of other minds be axiomatic too?

By Münchhausen's trilemma, all arguments are ultimately reducible either to circularity, infinite regress, or dogma. Choose your poison, but I think dogma is least the poisonous of the three. I suppose that's another one of my axioms.

Of course, argument by axiom is sometimes very non-convincing – it can be used to defend any position whatsoever. However, most would agree that there is a big difference between defending as an axiom "1+1=2", versus papal infallibility, or the uncreatedness of the Quran, or whatever. The question is, is the axiom "other minds exist" more like the former kind of axiom or more like the latter? Surely, more like the former.

> The other flavors don't have this advantage at all. It is impossible to trust my senses to arrive at the conclusion that other minds exist without first trusting them that they are correlated with features of a non-mind physical world. So, you can't use sense-based observations to claim that the world is made up of many minds.

You can't use sense-based observations to make metaphysical claims–and materialism is just as much a metaphysical claim as idealism or dualism are. There is no possible experiment or observation that could distinguish materialism from idealism, and any possible sense data is equally explainable under other theory.

> And their claim is that this can be directly experienced by you through self reflection - so if we call it idealism, it's still a form of solipsism ultimately, albeit more interesting than I would normally give this credit for.

That Hindu position is arguably closer to my options (3) (open individualism) or (4) (pan(en)theism) than to classical solipsism (my option 1).

In classical solipsism, my mind is truly real, but yours isn't. In the Upanishads, both our minds are equally real (as Brahman), and equally unreal (as maya and karma); in their equal reality they are identical to each other, in their equal unreality they are distinct

On re-reading your post several hours after my first response, there are a couple of things that now seem clearer to me.

The first is the question of "existing absent qualia": is this a reference to the p-zombie argument, which claims to show the metaphysical possibility of entities that are physically identical to us but which do not have qualia? I (and many others) reject this argument by rejecting the inference from conceivability to possibility, on account of it depending on a question-begging definition of conceivability.

If you do accept the zombie argument, then you are, ipso facto, accepting the metaphysical possibility of some things having qualia and other, otherwise identical things not having them - which would introduce a boundary into your panpsychic hypothesis that mirrors the one you are trying to use to reject emergent physicalism.

Secondly, you are misconstruing Occam's razor here: it is not a claim that constrains what sort of conclusion it is acceptable to argue for; it is, instead, an argument about what constitutes an acceptable set of premises. Both Occam's razor and logic in general accept that one can validly argue for a conclusion for which there is no other evidence than the evidence for your premises in conjunction with the argument you are making. To reject this would be to reject deductive and inductive reasoning!

Nevertheless, your argument does attempt to show that emergent physicalism would be predicated on a premise for which you say there is no evidence: the assumption that there are some things that are not conscious. This is mistaken, however: it simply does not take a position on that question, as its universe of discourse is limited to things with consciousness. Its conclusion almost certainly would have the corollary that many things are not conscious, but, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, there is nothing wrong in that, and an emergent-physicalist hypothesis would not be refuted even if there were no independent evidence for non-conscious entities (which is a claim that I have already disputed, in the final section of my previous reply.) To falsify the hypothesis on this basis, you would have to rule out there being anything without consciousness.

I'm not quite sure what point you're trying to make here. What is this hypothetical Eiffel tower situation an analogy to? Someone claiming our consciousness is derived from some ephemeral soul or spirit?

I'm not trying to assert or prove the inexistence of something (especially considering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence ). My belief is that our consciousness is a physical, organic phenomenon, directly emergent from the "circuitry" of our brain. I don't personally believe there is anything beyond that, unfortunately. Simultaneously, I'm not directly arguing that assertion or trying to "prove" it, because I'm simply stating my subjective opinion, which was clearly communicated in my post, with the wording "I’ve believed for most of my life" and "I consider it". It will never be anything more than a belief, because I will never be able to prove this. My observations and knowledge I've gained through life support my belief quite strongly, while none have ever provided a shred of support for an argument for any sort of "soul" or "spirit". I'm 100% open to the idea, but unfortunately literally all experiences related to life, consciousness and existence in my nearly 40 years alive have correlated with my "I am nothing more than my body" opinion.

More reading on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_spectrum

My intuition is that the "evidence" (i.e. traditional ancient texts describing "magic") do not seem to permit relying on purely materialistic mechanisms, and most seem to require some kind of mind-fu to work.

I think otherwise I broadly agree with your observations.