Consciousness

[Alan V]

And sure, we are our bodies, but mechanistically, it's difficult to see how we came about being able to have subjective experiences in the first place. It's not like subjective experiences just naturally emerge from being our bodies. We could be our own bodies and not need to experience anything phenomenologically.

When scientists have explained what they can about consciousness, perhaps phenomenological experiences will end up just being one of those brute facts. We are this way because that's the turn our evolution took.

I bet the dinosaurs, which were around for millions of years, didn't have anything approaching human consciousness. And they were successful enough without it.