Consciousness is irreducibly subjective. Francis Krick famously said “we are nothing but a pack of neurones” but this misses the qualitative, experiential half of our reality. When studying human consciousness we can only correlate experiential changes with changes in brain states, and for as tight as these correlations become we can never throw away the subjective element.

The sense of being a self inside of the head makes no neuroanatomical sense because we can find no locus of ego within the brain. All of our experiences are delivered by myriad different processes spread out over the entirety of the brain and each can be independently interrupted.

Losing the sense of a unitary self, which is to say a permanent and unchanging centre to consciousness, brings one’s experience of the world more in line with the reality.