The idea that consciousness is primarily initiated by symmetries and relationships underlying experience and that the phenomenal world is a secondary phenomenon or fabulation of this, is akin both to computational models and to Platonism - the two being closer in spirit than one might think - provides some insight into phenomena that are already largely relational, but does little for those that lean more on pure qualia, like colour and smell. The so-called secondary standing out as more primary than the primary ones.

Time and space are internal to the perceiving and knowing mind as the Kantians assert, however the mathematicians are also correct when they add that these are not present as imagined manifolds but as systems of transformational symmetries and equivalences. This is so immediately clear in the way we deal with things that it does not have to be taught, even if it is rarely explicit and if the folk psychology would opt for the imagined manifolds. By analogy, the same applies to the subjective mental self-understanding, to 'theories of mind'. There is no inner theatre but only systems of symmetries and invariants which make it possible locate and transform, transpose 'objects' in the effecting of motives and meanings.

The ego, that is the personal 'I', is a purely virtual function offering a loose centre for all self-reflexive motives, responses and cognitions. It has no feeling, no continuity, no force or ownership at all - it would be a category error to think that it did. The real error, however, is a different one, it is mistaking the ego for the self - perhaps a natural mistake since neither one 'exists' - only they 'don't exist' in quite different ways.

The way by negation, the not this, not this, must lead to the same destination as the way by affirmation, so negation must negate negation as well. Affirmation does not require an analogous turnaround, or if it does t is only in the recognition that every affirmation is always already its ow negation.

Most, or all, of what appears as your mind is indistinguishable in principle from an artificial intelligence, an electrical and thermodynamic complex processing organ with self-awareness. In this sense the 'hard problem' is internal to experience ad there should be a direct and non-theoretical access to the origin of the appearance of appearance. As far as this precise moment is radically unknowable this is an immediate pointing outside of the mind. In the same way, recognising this, wile possible, is by every mental criterion, extremely difficult - as if it resides just where the noise is the most intense, in the microscopic eye of the storm. Here knowing is by not knowing.

You are defined by he proximal culture because the way that you understand yourself, whatever it is, forms a part of this culture. The culture itself however belongs in a larger historical context and this to a yet larger one all the way back to the origins of humans and the origins of life. This kind of understanding s circular and ultimately collapses on itself. The first step was assuming the effability of reality, and thus of creation and of the creator, as if reality is answerable, is conversational. The idea of truth behind this is too small, not so much for reality but for us as awareness emerges into inescapable crisis.

As far as consciousness is concerned there i indeed no distinction between reality and dream, between the world and a simulation, which is why your being-in-the-world has nothing to do with consciousness. There must be another organ which you cannot perceive or know, just because all perception and cognition is subject to consciousness. This is what we struggle to speak of in almost everything we say, always failing, always trying again.