> I don't see how subjective experience, i.e. consciousness, can come about from purely material interactions as currently understood. That means that a Turing Machine would be able to produce them, which means that a bunch of monks working with paper and pencil for thousands of years would be able to produce them.
Not without input data, they couldn't. You can produce a model, but unless you collect data to validate your model against, you're just speculating in a void.
> There's something fundamental that we don't understand and the scientific community is very opposed to talking about it, dismissing any and all speculation as quackery.
We're talking about it right now, and I haven't heard anyone opposed to talking about it.
However, I'll fully dismiss opinions as quackery if they clearly misrepresent the facts, i.e. claims that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Bell's Inequalities prove free will are quackery. This isn't because the ideas are taboo or because I'm opposed to talking about them, it's because they're misrepresentations or misunderstandings of facts which are clearly established.
In my experience, when people claim that scientists are opposed to talking about their hypothesis, it's because their hypothesis has been thoroughly and concretely disproven.