Hmm but that sounds pretty much like how I currently understand how our brains work. Not sure how factual this is, but I remember watching a video about how our brains essentially lie to us.

I think there was a ping pong example in the video. It said something like you think you watch the ball come towards you and you think that you are making a decision and action to move the paddle on the ball's trajectory, but what really happens is that most of that is pre-observed, pre-decided and pre- acted upon subconsciously.

So the subconscious part does most of the work and then when your conscious part catches up and you feel like you are doing the reacting, it's actually your subconsciousness lying to you that this was your observation and your decided reaction.

Again, not sure how factual any of that is, but it made sense to me when I thought about how complex the task of observing+deciding+acting is in e.g. ping pong and how very little time there is to actually do all of that. Is it really possible to consciously observe, decide and act to a ping pong ball with so very little time there is to do all of that?

So based on that it does seem like we are the observer and our subconscious is the actor which also lies to us to make us feel like that the actor is us.

I can introspect, but that could just be my subconsciousness doing it and lying to me that it was by own conscious introspection.

> Do you imagine the self being split into an "actor" who makes all the decisions, and an "observer" who can see what's going on but can't influence the actor?

Not exaclty, because I bieleve this distinction between the material world and the "world of experience" is nothing but a simple model that's not helpful most of the time.

But I can surely imagine a world with all the actors, all the action, and no observers, yes. Isn't that what's called "the zombie" though experiment? But that's a though experiment that does not lead very far; soon you end up with a world of philosophical zombies who write and talk about their introspections and write whole books about consciousness, yet this imaginary world is supposed to be devoid of consciousness ; feels like a bunch of autonomous language models in a loop talking to each others add nauseam pretending to be humans, after the end of all life.

That's why in my mental model the biological phenomenon and the subjective experience are two sides of the very same coin unlike in the zombie though experiment. In practice you can't have one without the other.

I am unconvinced by your argument for the reason I gave initialy and that is nicely illustrated in that article: Your argument posits that introspection and thoughs belong firmly into the realm of consciousness. I actually believe, at the contrary, that if we wanted to have an actionable definition of conscousness we would have to free this concept from all particular biological processes such as thinking or introspecting, which certainly "color" it but do not define it. Of course we then end up with a concept of consciousness that is restricted to the immediate personal experience we have of experiencing something; the tiny tiny bit of unknown that's outside the reach of our senses and sciences, the only thing we can't observe. And the task is to articulate this mysterious bit with everything else we know.

I'm not sure if I'm making my view clearer or if I'm confusing everyone; to be fair we don't have a good vocabulary to describe what we cannot observe :)