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I have deliberately avoided in this conversation referring to ultimate explanation of causes precisely because this is inaccessible.
A satisfactory theory of something has to be able to make falsifiable predictions about the phenomenon and provide precise causal insight into its mechanisms.
String theory is not yet a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity because it does not pass this bar. And yet it is internally a lot more precise than any of the speculations going around in neurology, let alone anything that relates to consciousness.
I am satisfied saying atoms (or rather what they represent as a model) are material because they can be manipulated predictably through experiment. Produce the same level of predictable manipulation and then we can talk about how much explanation you need. Because as it is you have nothing.
How familiar with the field of neuroscience are you? We can make a lot of repeatable predictions, at various levels of examination, and pretty high reliability.
We can't make arbitrarily detailed predictions with arbitrarily high accuracy, but few sciences can.
The predictions you make and explanations you give with a materialist account of the mind are a lot better than the ones you get with a non-materialist account, though. Since we can never directly access the 'truth' of the 'ultimate explanation of causes', the 'truth' that humans have access to is just accepting whichever available model does best, for now.
How familiar with it are you?
Every neuroscientist I talk to somehow always ends up complaining that their field is it's prehistory and that the only tools they have are anecdotes of weird ailments, IRMs and chronometers.
The literature is littered with grandiose books about how things might work behind the scenes with lots of good hints but scant actual evidence.
We have lots of data about brain cells but no standard model for them. We know of many communication channels between neurons but we have no idea how they actually use them to talk to each other. We know the brain processes visual information but we have no idea how. Neural engineering is compelled to rely on statistical inference as a matter of course because we know so little.
This isn't exactly "arbitrary precision". These are fairly simple questions to ask about common things this organ does. And we have basically no idea how to answer them.
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