I had omitted my conclusions, as already too long:

Unless and until we 'explain' the Fact of Consciousness, employing the rigors demanded in science >where possible along the way, we're still a few meters past the cave mouth.
Ontology, philology, epistemology, [Referents!] … are the tools via which we try to keep Word-transmissions correct thus believable. Consciousness needs those words. (The Higgs-Boson triumph describes a much simpler, successful search re. new material-rules. No words needed there. Except about applied-math.)

Our techno- accomplishments are large. But *few scientists possess more than word-recognition of the philosophical underpinnings via which 'societies' even became possible, and IME very few so-trained ever investigate what goes on in that discipline, except for kibitzing (recently a tad on Wittgenstein?)/everyone now has Rock Stars. (No time for 'humanities', remember?) Still, the Questions abide. And we speculate. (Or just collect stuff.)
* Oppie was an outlier (in many ways) but not the only one, historically.

Carrion. (Surely there's a mental equivalent, junk-food for the Mind?)

And now conclude: Science is a mental tool; I expect its well-refined methods to be applied where their rules of 'consensus' are adequate to the kind of Problem. It is also a philosophy and we possess orgs. of Philosophers, attempting to study "That which makes us Human". There, neither physics, math nor chemistry (macro or micro) can directly relate-to that "Humanness". I wot. Else: we wouldn't need Philosophers. Then, however we would see what sorts of machine-designed new-Humans would be like.

I guess where we part re 'the methods of study" of the Human Situation, is: that my 'faith' in the scientific method (especially in that consensus qualifier) does not approach that near-Certainty level, evident in PZ's MO.
SImplest: I do not Trust the exclusively science-educated to be capable of relating our Human-ness to the Cosmos (nor 'proving' that there can be no such connection: in any meaningful, convincing way.)
Some matters just don't yield to algorithmic thinking.. like Art, Music, Poetry, Humans and Love.
[partial list]

of the exceeding clever backwards deciphering partly-within t=0, *cough* on down to a round-bottom picture of τ=0 (Aren't we lucky that such puzzles
keep us off the Street and ..they pay us a stipend too !?) Have to check out the series, next: how vastly superior to yesteryear physics texts!

(I had grokked that the quantum vacuum contains numberless Potential Energies, all nicely invisible to an Observer: antithesis of 'emptiness', that Void)
Oddly, that concept is a pronouncement of some ancient Sages, too: ~~ "the dark blue Nothingness which is alive with energies." Small (intellectual) world, eh?
Seems all you need is One of 'these' for n clones of our own small Universe.

It's compelling physical deduction. Still, quite far afield from God-ness hypotheses, the physics view leaves us with (never mind n-Universes)
a perpetual quantum vacuum; we don't understand 'perpetual' of course, nor how That application of pre-Time "time" squares with any old τ=0 in any old
(or New! Universe on, say 1-31-15 Our 'Time'?) I so confused.

At any rate, the seeking of The Origin of It All (the vacuum) under unKnowable laws of Perpetuity: is clearly a fool's errand, unless: the vacuum too had an Origin.
One could argue that these imponderables trump any query connecting a Source, Origin? to this Consciousness apparition. Quite beyond simple chicken -vs- egg, that-all.

Unless..