Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.

For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.

Speaking as a phenomenologist, it seems to me that a considerable portion of mind wandering actually is "mental avoidance behaviour", an attempt to cope with adverse internal stimuli or to protect oneself from a deeper processing of information that threatens self-esteem.

As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.

I believe we should really take our own phenomenology more seriously. What a good theory of conscious must explain is the variance in this subjective sense of realness: There clearly is a phenomenology of "hyperrealness", for example during religious experiences or under the influence of certain psychoactive substances.

At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.

Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.