Biology actually did have a version of the aether for a while, called 'vital force'/'vis vitalis'/'elan vital'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

Starting with the synthesis of urea, biology slowly started to abandon vitalism over the course of the 19th century (with maybe a few holdouts in the early 20th?). You'd be forgiven for thinking the concept was dead by now.

Until this current resurgence with these new debates about machine consciousness, that is! We're starting to see late-holdout-vitalist arguments returning (eg: "it's a special physics of active matter", "a special property of biological matter", or even "causally dependent on the specific biolchemistry of its origins" ) .

Note that biology mostly abandoned vitalism because we didn't need it anymore. The reason it's resurfacing here is because there's still a genuine mystery to be had.

From my perspective -pattern matching to the history of biology- the mystery is small, and will likely be resolved in a mechanistic way. Of course I need to be honest: there's also always the vanishingly small chance that this time we'll finally detect an actual vis vitalis.

However, if we define consciousness as something undiscoverable by empirical science, then that's not science or even skepticism anymore, but just another pseudoscience disguised in a white coat.