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It is not the scientist's job to decide about the nature of consciousness, or whether consciousness precedes materiality. This is the job of the philosopher, and when scientists make claims about such immaterial things, they are overstepping their bounds. The good scientists know this. Their job is to remain within a certain paradigm. They are to investigate reality insofar as it is material (relations of energy). When they go beyond this paradigm and make claims about the nature of reality itself, they are acting as philosophers and not scientists. But this requires a different set of tools and different criteria for truth (no less rigorous, of course).

In any case, to make claims about the immaterial (consciousness) on the basis of the material is to overstep the bounds of science.

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False. This is a failure to understand science. Science is not just engineering, astronomy, chemisty, biology, etc, it is the method we use to explore and explain reality. If you are considering something outside the realm of science, you are considering something outside the realm of reality.

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Do you have an argument for this position? Or does it depend on the unspoken assumption that reality is nothing other than the physical world? If so, that particular assumption has not been proven, which is rather unscientific.

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The only assumption I'm making is that reality consists of space, time, and the particles and forces which inhabit and interact with those and each other. If your position depends on the belief that there is more to reality than that, you can't argue your belief in any reasonable way. You can just fall back on the old religious standard of stating that no idea can be considered proven false if you choose to put that idea outside of reason and logic.

turtle back.
mother bear.
flying spaghetti monster.

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Or you could read hundreds of philosophers, many of whom are agnostic or atheist. The assumption that you have made in your thread is dogmatic. There is no way to prove that it is true, even in principle, which is what science demands. This is why good scientists will admit that they are not investigating the nature of reality. They are investigating a region of reality, the region that is physical. Scientists cannot, for example, say what space or time "are," they can only investigate space and time insofar as they are conceived of as measurable phenomena (that is, in some sense, physical). What they actually are is a philosophical and not a scientific question.

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