Consciousness, they argue, doesn’t have the properties of material things, therefore it is not a material thing. Therefore it is something else. Let’s call it spiritual. This may sound superficially interesting, but it is utter nonsense. They are making what we call a category mistake. They are assuming that consciousness is a thing, and they’re wrong. The brain is a thing, and it has all the properties of a thing. The mind is not a thing, it is a process. The mind is not the brain, it is what the brain does—it is the brain in action.
