Selection and Instantiation

Physics can only ever describe the shape of things — how they relate, how they move, what would happen under such-and-such condition — never what anything is actually like from the inside. Your own experience, though, isn't given to you that way at all: it's just directly there, not described from outside. This paper takes that asymmetry seriously and tries to work out exactly what it does and doesn't prove, rather than treating it as an automatic argument for anything supernatural. It spends real effort attacking sloppy versions of its own conclusion — for instance, showing that "knowing where you are" and "having an inner experience" are not the same thing at all, since ordinary GPS systems do the first with no inner life whatsoever — and tests itself directly against the strongest opposing view in the field. It also argues that several separate, well-known puzzles across different areas turn out to be one puzzle wearing different disguises. What it doesn't do is claim to solve the deep mystery of consciousness. It states plainly, and in detail, exactly what remains unexplained — which is rarer, and more useful, than it sounds.