I&#x27;ve got a very clear model for what consciousness is.<p>Let&#x27;s start by looking at how brains work for something that is much easier to reason about - vision. Light hits the eye, and it activates a set of neurons that are wired up to the light receptors. There&#x27;s further out neurons that are set up to catch certain higher-level patterns, like edge detection or objects headed directly toward the eye. Deeper and deeper these connections go, until you get something that you subjectively experience as &quot;seeing&quot;. It&#x27;s at this point that optical illusions work - flat images on paper that are designed to make the higher level visual pattern recognizers fire. At a very high level, how parts of the brain work is by activating based off the sensory data represented by the activation of other parts of the brain.<p>Just like detecting edges in your visual field was important in the ancestral environment, so was answering questions like &quot;what did you do on the hunt?&quot; with a good story. Just like there&#x27;s a portion of the brain the constructs edges from lower-level visual sensation, there&#x27;s a portion of the brain that constructs narratives from lots of different kinds of sensations. Furthermore, this narrative module has access to remembered narratives (since consistent stories are better ones) as another form of sense data.<p>That, in short, is what consciousness is - the brain making sensible stories out of the sense data it encounters, and making those stories available to the brain (including the story-making module, which is why you can make stories about the qualitative experience of story-making).