Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

We don't know "the experience itself", we know what we tell ourselves about the experience.

Clearly false. No one experiences pain after they form a concept of pain. Pain is the experience itself - primal and unmediated.

I was speaking metaphorically. To be precise, we don't have experiences somewhere located in a "space" where consciousness occurs, we simply have the brain's self-report that experiences occur in a "space"; we don't have an experience of this space, only our brain constructing a model which includes a spatial element. What I'm talking about is a different way to view consciousness. It's a construct created by the brain which includes the notion that we have a "thought" located "somewhere", usually imagined as being inside one's head. OOBE experiences are an example of this aspect of the construct going haywire. They did an MRI of a woman who could have out of body experiences at will. They found that her visual cortex would shut down, and the center for imaging the body in space would light up. This is an example of the brain "telling itself" that it is located differently than it normally tells itself. Other properties of this constructed model that we call consciousness are that it is unified (brain trauma shows that various parts of experience occur at various parts of the brain, thus unity is a false property), that it occurs in the now (experiments such as those of Libet show that events aren't integrated in real time), it is composed of sensory data including content generated by our linguistic centers, and it has a structure (ala the structures picked out by phenomenology). These "base properties" make up a mental model of an object -- our Cartesian theatre -- but the Cartesian theatre which we imagine in our heads is nothing more than a set of (semi)fixed properties that the brain is using as a map of our ability to control the environment. It is like a fly by wire system in an airplane. The flight stick doesn't correspond to anything real about the plane, it is just a set of data which tells the plane how to behave in an analogical sense. Similarly, a unified, spatially located, thought center doesn't exist anywhere in reality, it is just a collection of data that the brain uses to coordinate control of the body, the memory systems, our senses, and our language centers. It "creates" a model of reality that includes a Cartesian theater, but that theater is just an illusion; it is just the brain telling itself that such a thing exists.

I think consciousness is just an illusion.  Do you have any actual evidence that it isn't?

Of what is consciousness an illusion? Again you engage in self-refutation. You cannot think consciousness is an illusion without consciously thinking about it.

See above.