<p><pre><code>    &gt; I think rather than concluding that we must be more than physical, a
    &gt; more reasonable conclusion is that there&#x27;s something that we don&#x27;t
    &gt; yet understand about the physical world, i.e. how matter in the
    &gt; physical world can give rise to subjective experience.
</code></pre>
What you&#x27;re fumbling towards here is called the &quot;hard problem of
consciousness&quot;[1]. Essentially some believe that there&#x27;s some secret
sauce in the brain that gives rise to consciousness, while others
believe that there&#x27;s no such &quot;hard&quot; problem and that &quot;consciousness&quot;
is just what we call a bunch of simpler brain systems working in
unison.<p>My opinion is a layman that&#x27;s read quite a bit about this is that
there&#x27;s no &quot;hard&quot; problem, and the only thing that separates us from
&quot;lower&quot; animals is just that we&#x27;re running a slightly more
sophisticated version of the same physical brain processes, which we
like to call consciousness.<p>There&#x27;s no reason to believe that we&#x27;re anything than the cumulative
behavior of our brain matter, or that we&#x27;re somehow &quot;special&quot; in the
animal kingdom in another sense than e.g. wolves are more special &amp;
sophisticated than mice.<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hard_problem_of_consciousness" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hard_problem_of_consciousness</a>