Whoever said life had been explained? Perhaps there are som injudicious writings by individual scients, and a lot of lousy science journalins, but life has not been explained.
I know of no serious neuroscientist who would claim to understand te brain. But we do know some things, and what we do know is fully consistent with the hypothesis that the physical brain is required for consciousness.
Otherwise, why would the size of the brain in various species correspond with inferred intelligence?
Using the radio metaphor, why would it take a larger brain to have a deeper mind? I can hear Beethoven on a five dollar radio. Every note is there.
When you loose a limb you do not lose the knowledge of how that limb was used. If you aquire an artificial limb, you can learn to perform equivalent activities.
But if the brain is damaged, you lose not just an ability, but the knowledge of having had that ability. It is not like an out of tune radio or a cheap speaker. It is like losing both a station and the memory that the station ever existed. It is, in fact, losing a piece of your mind.
IMHO, the results would look the same whether one views the mind as an epiphenomenon of the physical brain or whether the physical brain is the mechanism of mind.
Seems to me that your statement requires the physical brain to operate a database in which case all of the data, processes and logic of a man would be downloadable. That is great sci-fi but I am not aware of any such actual progress (or even agreement on the mechanism of storage/retrieval).
Are you of the mind that, if scientists cannot explain life, then life cannot be explained at all? Possibly that may be a baseless assumption.
However, scientists are working on the problem -- though oddly enough it's the physicists and information theorists, not the biologists, who are doing it. I gather the reason the biologists eschew the subject is because the neo-Darwinist model does not provide a method by which the problem might be engaged. And thus the "dead-enders" apparently are content to assume that life is an epiphenomenon of matter, and just have done with it, just leave it at that. Personally, I find this evident lack of curiosity rather scandalous.