Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Angrboda]

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…. 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 you are trying to have it both ways by reducing consciousness to brain states and saying that that’s where the experiences are located (but not really). It seems that because you cannot conceive of experiences occurring anywhere within your model of reality you conclude that they do not exist at all. That too, as you like to say, is an argument from ignorance. Perhaps your model of reality is deficient if it cannot account for the existence of both non-local sensation and local physical events.

No, it's not anything of the sort. I have a model of what consciousness is that can be explained in terms of brain states. I just don't know how to explain my model very well. It isn't that I can't imagine what you are referring to, it's that I don't see it as being as parsimonious as my model. That's not an argument from ignorance. It's an argument that one hypothesis is more likely true because it incorporates fewer assumptions than one which postulates consciousness as being a non-material phenomenon. That's not a negative argument, but a positive one. While parsimony isn't a law of phenomena, it seems that a model that includes mechanisms which we already know exist is more plausible than one which postulates fantastic entities of which we have no experience.