Does anyone feel that consciousness is just irrelevant? My ability to be self-aware of my own experience is a high-level neural feedback system, not anything external to reality. Experience is the same whether or not I am "conscious" of it.,(reply>), I think that subjective experience IS the consciounsess. But I think you are trying to decribe the "philosophical zombie" problem? I.e. why is there the subjective experience at all if the behavior of the system just depends on the physical laws anyway?<br><br>The body and the brain would still react the same way to stimuli even if there was "nobody there" to experience it, even in very sophisticated ways like talking to other people about stuff.<br><br>In the end none of us can really exclude the possibility of extreme solipsism, and know with 100% certainty whether other people also have conscious experieces of their own, or if they're just collections of protons and electrons that behave as if they were conscious.