It’s one of the most familiar facts in the world that we have this subjective experience, but it’s also one of the most mysterious. Why is it that these physical processes in the brain should produce subjective experience? Why doesn’t it go on in the dark without any consciousness at all?
What we need to do is to take conscious experience itself as primitive, as a fundamental element of the world. It’s the same attitude we take towards space and time and mass in physics: we don’t reduce them to something more fundamental, but then we come up with fundamental laws that govern them and that can explain them.
