Our own consciousness awareness of our existence as a conscious awareness, is the fundamental empirical reality, and we directly know our own consciousness simply by "being aware of being conscious". When the conscious me is not being generated, because my brain is in sleep mode, my neurology is still "there" but my conscious mind is not there being aware of any of it.
Our atomic brain generates our electromagnetic consciousness. But once the consciousness is generated, it is a real energetic electromagnetic "entity" in its own right. That entity is "me". We directly experience our self "being" a conscious self. We empirically know our self by conscious self-awareness. We experience our self exerting conscious free will, such as my free choice to write this article. My mind exerts the causal energy that moves my fingers across this keyboard. I am not causally pre-determined. Nothing "made me" do this. I choose to do it of my own free will. My conscious being can exert its own electromagnetic energy to cause my brain/body to do what I "will" it to do. "Will" is how a conscious being -- who is "made of" electromagnetic energy -- exerts causation.
We empirically know we exercise free will by our conscious perceptual experience of doing it. That is the empirical "evidence" that needs to be explained. Perceptual experience empirically informs us of what is real, what is actual. Neurophysics accepts the evidence and causally/logically explains how the empirically known actual is causally/logically possible.
Sam dismisses the empirical evidence that he "is" a conscious self, by a priori proclaiming that our experience of our own conscious self is an illusion, and Sam simply "knows" he is a brain that "has neurology", but has no mind. It is easy to make astonishing but groundless claims about brains and minds, in the absence of a rationally coherent understanding of how conscious minds are "possible". Neurophysics fills that hole in our scientific understanding of our own reality as conscious human beings.
Even today, neuroscience's penetration into the brain is at the state of studying Mars from an Earth-based telescope and probing its surface with remote controlled rovers. We can see the large scale features but not the fine scale mechanics that underlie them. A brain has about 100 billion little living cells called neurons, that communicate with each other by chirping electromagnetic "notes" along about 100 trillion other "wiring" cells called glia cells. Each cell is made of millions of atoms, and atoms are complex constructions in their own right. All of this awesome electronic complexity is packed into a volume the size of the inside of your skull. Brains are vastly complex constructions, and neuroscience is only beginning to penetrate the complexities of brains and the brain-mind relationship.
The evidence that consciousness is an electromagnetic phenomenon is overwhelming, and is obvious once you get your mind into a perspective to "see it".
EEGs read brainwaves, which are neural electricity. The EEG machine is not hardwired into the brain: the neural electrical signals do not get into the EEG machine via wires that are soldered into the brain's neural wiring. The EEG "pickups" that are placed on the subject's skull are radio receivers that receive/read wireless transmissions of neural electromagnetism. Our consciousness, and the information we work with, is made of electromagnetic wave energy in the radio bandwidth at the long wave, low frequency end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Consciousness and neural radio information are made of electromagnetic wave energy at the long slow electrical end of the radio-wave bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. "Electricity" is radio waves. Electricity is electromagnetic wave energy at the long slow end of the radio bandwidth.
If a radio telescope receives radio waves from space at 60 cycles per second, and channels the radio wave energy along wires, the space-based radio waves function exactly like household electricity that is generated at 60 cycles per second. Electricity "is" radio wave energy, at the long wave, low frequency end of the radio bandwidth. Electricity is not a flow of massive physical electrons, like water molecules flowing through a pipe. Photons of electromagnetic wave energy causally interact with atomic electrons, but the energy waves and the electrons are two different kinds of stuff: immaterial wave energy and physical matter.
EEGs read neural radio broadcasts, and re-present those wave patterns on a monitor. Neuropsychologists can correlate the visible on-screen "brain-wave" patterns with the subject's reported conscious experiences, to see the large scale energy pattern of that person's conscious experience of "seeing yellow", for example. There may be 100 million bits of electromagnetic wave information dynamically interacting with each other to produce the conscious experience. EEGs read the big picture patterns -- "brainwaves" -- not the fine structure wave mechanical details that comprise the compound complex waveforms of brainwaves.
Our conscious waveform is itself made of millions of bits of wave energy, and we do interact with and consciously experience the fine scale structures of electromagnetic information. Our body/brain is an exquisitely sensitive electronic device; and our conscious being is an exquisitely sensitive electromagnetic "experiencer". Our visual electronics can be activated by, and our conscious mind can "see", a single photon of light. A photon is a quantum unit of electromagnetic wave energy. We can consciously "see light" at the quantum scale of individual photons.
3000 years ago Solomon observed his body and exclaimed, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And Solomon didn't know the half of it.
Around 1870, James Clerk Maxwell realized that light is electromagnetism, electro-magnetic wave energy. Visible light is the "middle" bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum: from red-orange-yellow through green through blue-violet. The wavelengths of visible light are between long vibrating infrared "heat" below the long slow red end of visible light; and short sharp penetrating ultraviolet beyond the short fast blue-violet end of visible light. The entire electromagnetic spectrum (from electrical/radio through infrared through visible light through ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays and cosmic rays at the very short wavelength very high frequency end) is sometimes referred to as "light".
Electromagnetic wave energy is an elastic phenomenon. Its waves can be stretched and compressed by "electronic devices" like atoms, TVs, smartphones, and human body/brains. So we can think of electrical signals and radio waves as "stretched" waves of visible light, and X-rays as "compressed" waves of light. It is not incorrect to think of the entire spectrum of electromagnetic wavelengths as "light", even if we do not think of it all in terms of stretched or compressed "visible" light.
Our neurons chirp out bits of electromagnetic information along axon-wires. At the bare wire Nodes of Ranvier along axons, some of that signal is broadcast into our cranial wifi information environment where our conscious mind causally interacts with and "is aware of" the information, in the conscious phenomenon we call perception. Consciousness-waves are broadcast into our cranium, at a "normal" cyclic rate of 7-13 waves per second, by specific neuron groups including, but probably not limited to, the reticular formation in our brainstem. So 7-13 times per second, a consciousness wave/brainwave sweeps through our cranial wifi information environment where it can "read" any information that has been broadcast into our cranium at the same time.
All animals have reticular formations, and animals are observably "conscious" life-forms. In his 2012 book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, Damasio is almost prepared to attribute consciousness to such lowly life-forms as insects. I might go even further and attribute a kind of awareness to all life-forms, including plants; though lower life-forms clearly do not construct any mental conception of being a conscious "self" who is "having" conscious experiences. In Descartes' Error, Damasio describes how we construct the information content of what he calls our "neural self". If you want to understand how you and other people construct their self-image, Damasio nailed it with his explanation of the neural self.
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