A Working Draft Design Argument

[GrandizerII]

You're saying that consciousness under the postulate I provided must necessarily be an epiphenomenon, but I don't see why this must be so.

But even if I'm forced to concede that, the act of assigning values and meaning is then reduced to physical processes happening in our nervous systems (or similar such systems in possible alien beings), so we're still ultimately the arbiter of meaning and value, because we possess these systems.

Those physical process cause us to recognize values and meaning, but we’re not the arbiter of them, we’re a passenger, not the captain. We don’t dictate the destination. 

My consciousness mind might see a value being attached to certain things, a meaning to life            revealed, but I watch this as a man at a movie, not as a director.

I’m a character and a reader of a story, not it’s author.

Ok, you can put our consciousness aside, no problem. Biological processes in our bodies lead to the act of assigning meaning and value. Assigning itself would be explicable in terms of the physical, in accordance with how our brains are wired to perceive.