Taliesn may well be out of his league, Mary; but he is pointing to a very strong point. Counting and statistics depend for their validity on certain mechanisms of space and time which make repeatability of mechanical processes workable and countable. Quality of and in itself is not countable, although you can dream up ways to attach metrics to it indirectly. If you put six apples in a bag it is easy to say they are six, but in doing so you are roundly ignoring the myriad differences between them, since they come from diferent places, have differences in hue and shape and flavor and chemistry. You have to ignore the distinctions in order to count the "samenesses", and you are also relying on the time-space mechanisms of separation, unidirectionality, spatial continuity and homogeneity, and so on.

There is no guarantee that consciousness itself operates within those mechanisms and constraints. Imagination certainly does not, and there is some experimental indication that time-reversal is much more normal in the realm of consciousness and its effects on material systems, than it is in any material system.

If, on the other hand, you assume as your initial premise that consciousness is a byproduct of complexity in material systems only, the "thought is all in the brain" school of thought, whose loudest proponents are people like B.F. Skinner, the father of stimulus-response psychology, and Francis Crick, then the whole debate is meaningless and the meatheads carry the day based on that premise. But personally, I think it is a dangerous premise riddled with inconsistencies.

A