I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.

I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.

Only as long as we believe in our own identity over time does it make sense for us to make future plans, avoid risks, and treat our fellow human beings fairly - for the consequences of our actions will, in the end, always concern ourselves.

If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little "Think me!" and our mind begins to wander.

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.

I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.