> fMRIs say where blood is flowing in the brain, but that's hardly enough to explain the phenomenon of subjective experience.
fMRI scans correlate well with neural net embeddings. That is a great hint. We just need to look at the semantic spaces developed in these models, by a purely mechanistic process, to see how it goes from data to semantics.
The idea that we will just need to do that is a form of faith, no more rational (in my opinion, less so) than belief in a soul.