It seems that, until we have a falsifiable test for consciousness, these exercises are pointless. All we have is the ability to externally observe behavior and we can't judge what happens inside someone (or something's) mind. BTW, we don't have a good definition of mind either.

That there's nothing magical or supernatural in our minds and our consciousness is a given, otherwise, this becomes a very silly debate where everyone will have a strong position that can be neither proven nor disproven.

Maybe we are able to constrain what consciousness (or a mind, or a soul) is by figuring out everything it isn't. Does it have a mass? Can we measure its entropy?

We can, to a certain degree, identify images from the visual cortex. What else about the internal state of a brain can we extract? We did that to a fly's brain the other day - a very confused simulated fly that must have been wondering why its world had so low a resolution.