Thank you, this is my favorite subject. It is pretty easy to see how self-consciousness arose through natural selection. A creature that can maintain an internal map of its world and locate itself with that map gains obvious survival advantage. And lol! Here we are. Nature doesn't ask our leave, nor does she owe us an explanation. So in some sense I'm a physicalist, although I don't think we will ever know the nuts and bolts of how it works. I've never come across a ghost story, parapsychology demo, or NDE that I found convincing. To often the purveyors of such don't understand that the burden of proof is on them.

Yet I'm a guy who's in church nearly every Sunday. More on that here:

https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-believe-in-god-even-if-you-are-an-atheist-110fe05a119c