Inner experience is registered in the stream of time, and so it is the order and direction of this streaming that gives inner experience what coherence it has. The contents of the flow of time, however, only exist in relation to something else that is relatively stationary in time. In the constitution of your reality this permanence is your awareness of your body and through that of the external sensory world. The other stationary pole is taken to be the deep subject whose mode of being is the stationary now, this however is not stationary in the same time frame as the flow of consciousness and cannot serve as the element that stabilises experience. This is also evident because disassociated states are possible in which temporal coherence is lost without any modification to the deep subject - who is in effect indifferent to the quality of temporal experience.

If there is an other nature that undergirds consciousness and if there is 'something that it feels like' to be that other nature, as in panpsychism, then it may be enough, in the sense of being metaphysically complete, that there be such an other nature without the need to posit a continuity between it and your (kind of) consciousness. The latter is not built up in an atomic fashion out of the former, but it is merely supplied with a sufficient amount of uniqueness, of pure distinction outside of any rules. That would bootstrap consciousness as we know it without in any way resembling it, while also supplying enough true otherness to stabilise the world, as matter was supposed to have done. Otherwise we are left with pure or Berkeleyan idealism, in which the there is nothing behind the experiencing at all, and the very question is meaningless.

In any computationalist or materialist, or more generally anti-idealist theory of consciousness there is a categorical barrier between the substrate, the nuts and bolts under the bonnet, or electrochemical sloshings in the wet brain, and the experiencing that is produced. You might get to a point of perfect theoretical understanding of the physical computations but you can never experience them as they go since there is simply no experience in these interacting bits of stuff. But the stuff here is the stuff of theory, which means that it consists of natural kinds of things (molecules etc.) interacting according to fixed rules (laws of physics etc.) - and these kinds and rules are already products of the mind, having the sort of ideality ascribed to appearances. So their very non-experience-ability is itself a category of mind, in fact a certain kind of experience. If you were able to watch the brain processes of your very watching as it was happening you'd experience the thrill of the sublime in the adamantine heterogeneity to experience of the elements constructing experience, and such would be neither in nor out of experience. Materialism etc., has no more meaning than that.

You only have a world because experience is temporally and causally ordered. These forms of order are products of the mind insofar as it works in the background to impose the framework of order. But this is a causal way of thinking of the mind, the mind is the cause of the principle of cause which is what enables there to be an experience world in which there is a mind productive of order. This rapidly becomes absurd, but it ought to be possible in an altered state to experience being the primary ordering imagination. To know something in this way, even if it is accompanied by a noetic quality of certainty is already to be dis-identified from it. All that remains is unfettered imagination.

There are so many different lines of investigation aimed at the constitution of this reality, whether internally, from inside or from outside invoking a metaphysics. If the aim is to make us feel at home, perhaps for the first time, then it not being served. Instead the accumulation of foundational speculations weans us progressively from every familiar footing, alienates the world as if that is our proper destiny.

Awareness of awareness is awareness of the momentary nature of experience since awareness-as-object contains everything that is real, as if all of time is concentrated at this one point and this point is immediately succeeded by another such point, this point again, and another. The lived world is nothing more than a schematisation of such moments which is itself no more than a further moment. It is not circularity so much as an infinity where the whole is contained in the part.

You always perfectly believe what appears in the monitor that re-presents experience within a fractured narrative. This is how you get to have strong feelings of various kinds; they pertain that narrative and colour the implicit belief you have in it. You could never see your self as such and such a personage if you weren't first inclined to see yourself or look for yourself in that doubled way. In this way the ego can be simultaneously central and off centre.