Topics of the mind are self-referential and so make most people self-select into three groups, in order of decreasing religious fanaticism:
1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.
2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.
3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.
There is nothing religiously fanatical about seeing that everything in science appears to be explained by our laws of physics, and concluding that human consciousness probably is, too. In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers and every single time it's turned out to be just physics, just biology, just chemistry...
And here we have something mysterious and poorly understood (and poorly defined...): consciousness. And again as always the quacks line up with their magic to explain it all. Higher dimensions! Quantum effects! We're all in the matrix and only our minds are real! Even though we can clearly see that so many mental processes can be influenced with drugs, with hormones, with magnetic fields, or with a scalpel. Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
> In our history we've seen time and time again that humans will believe in magic and higher powers
Indeed; and these days in tech circles it is the magic of atoms (or strings, or whatever entities you like). The fact that physics by design makes no claims about objective existence of anything does not stop them from thinking that somehow all those entities (which are merely metaphors, ways to create models that are legible to our minds) must exist in some fundamentally objective sense; neither does the fact that we cannot directly access them other than via consciousness, or that the entire idea of empirical observation hinges on the existence of the observer.
> Everything points to yet another physical thing that we'll hopefully understand and explain soon.
It had been explained [away] already—since you appear to hold physicalism, you may also like illusionist theories of consciousness.
1. Monistic physicalists. Here because of the school. We studied physics so everything looks like a nail: reality is made out of atoms, consciousness is an illusion, etc. The most vocal and fanatic crowd in tech.
2. Cartesian dualists. Soul vs. body, etc. Here because of the church. Surprisingly, there can be some degrees of rigour here. In tech circles, members are on average a bit less reluctant to switch to another group.
3. Monistic idealists. Here via critical reasoning, so could switch to another group if there was a good reason. See not only topics of the mind as self-referential, but every other topic as implicitly mind-referential.