Imho, materialism and non-materialism mesh well together. It's just the two camps, materialists and occultists, are too arrogant to recognize that the other camp might understand certain things better.
A self aware intelligent organism or machine needs three key components: a material foundation that's sufficiently organized (a large net of neurons, a silicon crystal, etc.), a material fluid-like carrier to control the foundation (that's always electricity and magnetism) and the immutable immaterial principle to constrain the carrier (math rules, physical laws, software algorithms). That's the core idea of occultism rephrased in today's terminology.
The "conscious field" would be identical with the magnetic field here and neurons don't need any magical properties to receive this field: they just need to be conductive, like transistors. I think the reason the AI progress has stalled is because 0-1 transistors are too primitive and too rigid for the task. I guess that superintelligence is only different in the performance and connectivity degree of the material foundation: instead of slow neurons with 10k of connections it would be fast quasi crystal like structure with billions of connections that needs to move very little matter around (but it has to be material and consist of atoms of some sort).