What is it about consciousness that is immaterial. The sensation of a pin prick, the love of a dear friend, the heat from a hot stove? You can pinch my arm and damaged unmylinated C-fibers will send messages up axons and dendrites and result in further synapses all the way to the brain, whereupon chemical will release and that is the scientific explanation of pain. However, what science can't ever explain is the actual subjective sensation of pain that makes you say "ouch!", the perception of color, the things we perceive, feel and think. Science deals with objective facts, not subjective reality, which we are each intimately aquainted with. however, consciousness isn't like tables or chairs. You can't objectively point to consciousness. In fact you can't see another persons consciousness. You can only assume they are conscious by how they act and respond.

I think that there might be an afterworld. I'm agnostic in this but I look around and see many things that amaze and horrify me. I don't pretend I know, but I am optimistic that this immaterial thing that I am, this active, organizing, creative thing I call the self is real and that it may survive after the death of my material self.

If we were strictly material, physical things then why aren't computers conscious? Will they ever be? A computer has sufficient power to defeat a grandmaster at chess, but does it know what it's actually like to play the game chess. To have so much fun at it that it never would want it to end like so much of us don't want life to end? Or, are computers just dark inside, following electrical impulses, and the only intelligence that they do have is really owed to the code rules typed into them by software programmers?

A couple thoughts:
Would a computer ever get a joke?
Would a computer ever see the beauty in a sunrise or poem?