See, this isn't "exactly". It's a nice narrative with no evidence that its neatness translates in any way to a description of reality.
What you're talking about is the epistemology of science. When we talk about awareness, an entirely different way of knowing is opened up. The nature of subjectivity is such that it cannot be exteriorized as evidence. It can be shared and communicated but not described as an objective reality - it must be experienced first hand. My idea describes precisely why this would be the case. It's because awareness begins at the beginning of the Cosmos. It's not an accidental side effect of mechanical processes. It represents a fundamental cosmic underpinning on par with and in contradistinction to mechanical processes.
You can't just say that you base consciousness in matter itself and call it a solution. It's not more exact than "basing it in electrochemical processes". Yeah, that's the conclusion, so how was it arrived at and how can it be checked?
What we can reach with X has no bearing on its veracity, now does it?
I'm not calling it anything. It's just an idea. Philosophy of Physics. Whether or not the idea can be checked to a specific standard has no bearing on its veracity either. This particular idea requires a much broader framework of understanding than just mathematics. For studying the subjective, fields like Psychology, Linguistics and Anthropology are more relevant.
Sense is the evidence of sense, not much else.
What else is there? Every measurement, study, inquiry, experiment, theory, and conclusion begins and ends with sense, (in both senses), and is wholly concerned with sense at ever step in between. The idea of steps at all is sense.
if I see red trees due to sleep deprivation, what does that tell me about anything except me?
Of course. You're human, so it tells you something about the effects of sleep deprivation on human perception. If trees are the only thing that look different, then it could tell you about how tree-like images are processed differently from others. You might learn about red. Or the need for sleep.
If I regularly converse with aliens during sleep paralysis? Of course I don't just ignore what I perceive, but there has to be a way to make sure that what I perceive is accurate in some way.
Of course we do need empirical methods of determining objective truths, but not everything can or should be confined to those limitations. Delusions or hallucinations may not tell us about what they appear to be, but they can reveal quite a lot about how consciousness and the Self functions.
You seem to be of the opinion that what's perceived and what perceives is somehow directly interlinked; again, where are the studies?
If you alter the neurochemistry of the perceiver, you alter what they perceive. You've got the Observer Effect in QM which suggests that the Observer alters the experiment (I disagree, but I do agree that the effect positively links the observer with the observed).
I wouldn't say that they are directly interlinked, any more than you are directly interlinked with someone sitting next to you in a stadium when they do 'the wave'. You perceive the wave, you participate in the wave, the wave has no reality outside of the collective participation of the audience. This is roughly how I think light works. There's not an octillion tiny wavelet-particles being unloaded into the crowd which causes it to happen - the dynamic is shared enthusiasm; voluntary but inspired by example.
You can't just "map" your own consciousness and draw conclusions about the universe in its entirety. Of course you can arrive at ideas in this way, but without actually chacking them they're not worth much (except, naturally, to you personally).
I agree. So far the examples I've used to check them check out. I welcome anyone else's examples to check out also. That's all I can do. I can't make others value the ideas, they have to check them out for themselves.
Everything about sensory input and consciousness that we can consciously perceive has gone through so many instances of filtering and processing that the perceived and the perceiver become inextricable.
I agree. Yet there is a common basis for transduction through every filter and every process. It makes a different sense to us than it does to different perceivers, but perception of any sort can only process something which makes sense in the first place.
What observations did you make, anyway? What part of consciousness makes you think that no carrier particle is needed to transfer energy/information/whatever?
How the human eye works = stimulation originates at the retina, then passes to the optic nerve, then visual cortex. No particles exterior to the cornea are necessary. Our sense is that we see and look at things or into things rather than any kind of physical substance hitting our eyes. Why don't the bazillion photons traveling as fast as possible at all times hit each other and cause distortion routinely?
How a microwave works = Since our eyes aren't tuned to respond to the microwave frequency, we get a more objective perspective of what electromagnetism is. No heat to feel, no light to see, just food being stimulated to cook itself. If there were photon particles which are so small as to be invisible, then surely they would pass through the holes in the radiation mask on the door. (I understand the concept of larger wavelengths being stopped by the screen, but it makes a lot more sense to look at the technology without imaginary waves being propagated through space).
How a beam of light works = You don't see a beam of light in a vacuum. Only if there are particles in the path of the light source will you see illuminated particles. Any matter can be illuminated, but non-matter cannot. Why do the light particles only show up in the presence of particles of matter?
How images work = The simplest things can reflect or project a complex image. The surface of a liquid or a polished metal, a piece of transparent material. The idea of the material of our retina and visual nervous system changing to conform to the shared conditions it senses makes a lot more sense to me than a world inundated with flying pieces of dumb light which are somehow assembled into coherent images through our eyes, then our nerves, then our brains, then our minds. With my way, all matter shares the language of electromagnetic coherence, and what we see is a reasonable facsimile of what we get (at the scale that our awareness operates on).
The language of light = Terms like enlightenment, illumination, brilliance, bright, seeing the light, insight, clarity, lucidity, transparency all reveal a natural intuitive association between light and awareness, intelligence, understanding, communication.
Lighting = When you turn on a light or open a door or window to the daytime sunlight, how does it look? Do you see senseless bits of images flooding your eyeballs to be constructed into images? Or are you instead able to see a lot of understandable details in the physical objects in the room around you - each object matter-of-factly exposed for what it is in response to the illumination which your eyes are part of?
Lightning = Why doesn't the effect of the sun in the atmosphere behave more like lightning? With photons as particles, shouldn't turning on a flashlight look like a chaotic branching explosion of light rather than an undisturbed geometry of effect?
Photon = No mass, no charge, somehow both wavelike and particle like (which are ontologically mutually exclusive, like square circles...unimaginable), propagates even through a vacuum but cannot be observed directly, observation of any kind evokes weird otherworldly uncertainties and observer effects. Why does the photon have no independent existence? Where are the photon clusters and residues?
Especially since we can actually observe those particles. Or entities, if you prefer.
You've observed a photon?
To sum up, what I think of your idea is that it's a bunch of assertions claiming to be mathematically equivalent to current theories despite adding new information, new terms, and which refuses to put up any predictions or testability - in other words, means to substantiate it.
I've never claimed anything, let alone some kind of mathematical equivalent to anything. There's no math in my ideas at all - it's all about qualitative experience. I try to avoid making any assertions at all, I only present ideas for other people's consideration.
As for testability, I think that if same laboratory experiments which led to interpretations such as non-locality, entanglement, identity, uncertainty, and the Observer Effect were to be re-interpreted with a model based on awareness and behaviors of atoms rather than strange/dumb projectiles released between them, then these apparent paradoxes might be resolved.