Consciousness (Human, animal, etc) Can Exist Without a Brain

Your first point boils down to "we have no good reason to believe consciousness can work without a brain". My question is "why?". I'll leave it there, because I'll be stating the good reasons shortly.Your second point is that the word "consciousness" is a placeholder for a concept that isn't fully understood, sort of a "working title" until science can explain it and describe how it arises; correct me if I'm wrong. We may not have a rigourous definition but we do at least agree on what is and isn't conscious. Alive and awake people are all conscious, I'm sure if we were walking across a warzone for example, we'd be able to say "oh that guy is conscious, that guy has no head left he isn't conscious" and we'd agree on who did and didn't have this quality. We know what it is we don't know how it works.To add to your third point, I'll provie this quote:Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ("What else could it be?") I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electromagnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer.—JOHN R. SEARLE, R13;"MINDS, BRAINS, AND SCIENCE"Not only have we been wondering how the brain and the mind depend on each other, but we have been thinking over many centuries, about the brain by itself and how it works. The question of the day is, "can we make one?".--- Ray Kurzweil estimated the computational efficiency of the brain to be about 10^16 calculations per second (page 125, [1]). Ray Kurzweil estimates the memory of the brain, considering 10^4 bits allocated per neural connection to be 10^18 bits (page 127, [1]).John Von Neumann estimated the memory requirement of the brain to be 2.8*10^20 bits per human lifetime without the act of forgetting (page 64, [2]). So we have some rough estimates of the "RAM and ROM" we would need. We are getting close to these numbers, the prediction is that in the next decade we will be able to compute at 10^16 CPS. The brain performs logical and computational operations. Some of its processes are analog, and some of them are digital. We've built machines to perform these processes; the brain is not necessarily more complicated, it's just a lot of it. We know for a fact that humans are made of nothing but atoms, and atoms obey the laws of nature. So it would be straightforward to assume that, if only we knew how the brain was built, that we would be able to use the technology we have today to make some sort of consciousness. It probably would not be as smart as a human but maybe it could at least have sentience and think about things we ask it, and respond.In the way that neurons are wired, they can be stimulated in a number of ways. These seem to represent basic logical operations such as AND, OR, NOT, etc. Together, a network of neurons that only uses these 3 operations can perform any operation, no matter how complex. In practice though, the neural pulses that transmit across axons to the body of a neuron can have more complicated arrangements than just simply AND, OR, and NOT. The stimulation criteria may change for a neuron body's input over time as well, which could be difficult to model. However, given that there is much research being done in this area, and we are always figuring out more about how the brain works, I think it will only be a matter of time before we figure it out and reproduce it.---And I'm opening up a chance for you to find a flaw in this statement: I see no special powers or miracles that are used to create a living brain. The brain may be more advanced than anything we have ever built, but I see no evidence for anything spooky like a "soul" or "the hand of god" being necessary to install consciousness in an arrangement of atoms called a "brain". Unless you can suggest something that we pathetic humans could never get our hands on, which is a vital ingredient to consciousness, we'll figure out the recipe soon enough.---[1]The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil [2]The Computer & the Brain, John Von Neumann