Imagine, if you will that the brain is an antenna, and consciousness is a soulful radio wave. If you destroy/make inert the brain, consciousness is lost, what have you shown? You may be tempted to claim that you demonstrated the fact consciousness arises from the brain, but this isn't the case here: The consciousness radio-wave still exists, but it is not being received.
The problem is a hard problem which may or may not be ill defined.
> The consciousness radio-wave still exists, but it is not being received.
So when someone dies, their consciousness continues, but is unseated from their body?
Presumably temporary unconsciousness is explained the same way?
How do you explain population increases or population decreases? Is there an infinite pool of consciousnesses, and only an infinitesimal proportion of them are being received at any given time?
Do drugs affect the receiver, or the consciousness (transmitter) itself? If it's the former, you've just conceded that some fundamental aspects of our consciousness are contingent on the receiver, and are independent of the transmitter. You can't very well answer the latter, as drugs exist firmly in the physical domain.
You'll also need to account for wildly different forms of consciousness (animals), the split-brain phenomenon, and why certain arrangements of molecules and their associated processes (i.e. living brains) can act as receivers but other closely related arrangements do not (dead brains, and living brains subject to general anesthesia). To steal a word from Dawkins, the whole thing seems unparsimonious in the extreme.
To mirror lostmsu's comment, this is a truly extraordinary claim, made in the total absence of supporting evidence. I'm not convinced it's even a coherent model.
Popper concerns itself with test-ability, not truth. Something can be both untestable and true.
Occams razor says more about human psychology and beliefs than it does about reality.
In any case I was not arguing that this scenario represents the true state of the universe, but am arguing against grand parent's argument that we can conclude consciousness is physical without making certain assumptions about the nature and design of the universe, even if empirically it is our best guess.
I am not sure I'd care about the definition of "true", that does not fulfill the Popper criteria. That is the whole point of it.
Occams Razor is a tool people use to pick the best theory (in terms of size) among theories otherwise describing the same universe. These theories are otherwise identical.
The same applies to your last point: we simply pick the best theory at hand, and that argument does exactly that.
The problem is a hard problem which may or may not be ill defined.