Say, let’s admit consciousness is the result of a physical process.
Then say this process only goes “forward” when our time coordinate increases. Just like an egg gets cooked when it’s temperature coordinate increases, but it doesn’t get more or less cooked when it’s temperature coordinate decreases.
This would mean that going back in time doesn’t result in any perceptible change, since your consciousness hasn’t evolved from it’s “former” state.
Thus making it possible for us to be travelling through plenty of dimensions in varied directions, only ever experiencing the brief times when you happen to be moving in increasing time. Or whatever combination of movement along varied dimensions makes it possible for you to be conscious.
TLDR: i need to take shorter showers
We don’t have proof that consciousness is the result of a physical process. But there’s no reason to think it isn’t. You can make up anything and say it’s unknowable, and nobody can prove this false; but it’s pretty much useless. Sure you can stick with ‘I think therefore I am’ as the only knowable thing, but it won’t get you very far. The physical world as science has self-consistently explained has been shown to be very practical, specifically with prediction of observation. Consciousness seems different, but there’s no real reason to assume it is.
That’s not the case. This is a very active area in academic philosophy and there are, objectively speaking, several reasons to think that consciousness is not solely a material process (whether or not you think these are good reasons is for you to decide). For an accessible introduction to this topic I recommend Facing up to the problem of consciousness by David Chalmers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Knowledge Argument is also a good intro if you are looking to dive right into something a bit more technical.
Thing is that science cannot prove matter is prior either, yet that is taken as the core assumption that all other assumptions must align to.
This is the scientific version of Christians saying “god is real, says so in the bible, and because bible was written by god, it must be true”.
Science can’t prove anything. It seeks to build comprehensive models that agree with observations by disproving those that don’t. It is specifically built in a way that uses predictions based on theory and then tests them. This process is used to avoid making useless and unknowable additions. That, and its inherent nature to question everything, is what makes it fundamentally different from religeon. However, it is based on an assumption that the universe makes sense as a physical construct. And that is because there is no other useful starting point. You can try to build a model of the universe based on any gibberish of feelings, but it isn’t useful in any way.
Useful to what end? The very idea that you need to build a model is based on believing in a system that thinks the model is important.
A model is an understanding of how it works. It allows one to predict how things might react in different general cases, which can be very useful for innovation. You don’t need to try understand things if you don’t want to, but it’s a bit ignorant sounding.
The way you’re discussing ‘models’ seems to assume two points: (1) that all useful models will be physical models, and (2) that we have models that work in this context. Neither of these assumptions are correct.
For the first point, arguably the most popular model of consciousness we have at the moment is Integrated Information Theory (IIT). IIT is explicitly a panpsychist theory (all matter has some non-zero quantity of consciousness). This lends itself very well to non-physicalist interpretations (where consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe, irreducible to matter).
For the second point, all this discussion of models is largely besides the point. Because there is currently no model of conscious experience that works. No theory is widely accepted. And the theories that were once popular (global workspace theory and even IIT) seem to not the supported by evidence (proponents of these theories have tried to modify them to fit the data, but you can only do that so many times before things start to looks sketchy). So whether we use a model or not, it’s not really relevant to this discussion, because we currently have no scientific models of consciousness that work.
“Models work because they help us make better models, and we know better models work because… they’re better models.”
I think maybe you misunderstand what a model is in this context. It’s any way of mapping observations to a theory of how things work. I would say a good model is one that can create useful testable predictions. This tests the accuracy of the model, and it also provides for innovation. You can have a model based on a random sky fairy magically doing stuff and writing a book about it. But that model is untestable, and useless.
Again, define useful/useless? To what end do you create these models?
Again, to understand our observable reality and make predictions.