Comment by goatlover

Why always the strawman about "magic" or "supernatural" in these debates? The universe can be natural without it being fundamentally physical or functional. We don't know that consciousness is functional, in fact one could argue consciousness is the one thing that isn't captured by functional explanations. Because when you explain how a brain functions, the experiential part is left out and just assumed since we have brains that have experiences. So obviously there is a correlation. But we don't know that this correlation exists for anything functionally equivalent. We don't know that consciousness can be simulated.

My view is physical, functional, mathematical and informational explanations are abstractions from shared experiences. Abstractions remove the experiential aspect to arrive at something objective so we can understand the world around us, since experiences are creature and to some extent, individually dependent. This is Nagel's ultimate point in What It's Like to Be A Bat paper about the objective/subjective divide. And probably related to Kant's argument about phenomena vs the noumena outside experience. We try to understand reality via abstraction.

And it has nothing to do with magic. It's an epistemological situation we find ourselves in, which may or may not tell us something fundamental about the world. Depends on your metaphysical assumptions as to what can fundamentally exist.