On one level, wisdom is nothing more than the ability to take your own advice. - Sam Harris

Either consciousness is epiphenomenal or it’s outside a physical system but somehow playing a role in physics. That’s a more traditional, dualist possibility. Or there’s a third possibility: Consciousness is somehow built in at the fundamental level of physics.

How would your relationships change if you resolved never to lie again? What truths about yourself might suddenly come into view? What kind of person would you become? And how might you change the people around you?

Forces of digestion and metabolism are at work within me that are utterly beyond my perception or control. Most of my internal organs may as well not exist for all I know of them directly, and yet I can be reasonably certain that I have them, arranged much as any medical textbook would suggest. The taste of the coffee, my satisfaction at its flavor, the feeling of the warm cup in my hand — while these are immediate facts with which I am acquainted, they reach back into a dark wilderness of facts that I will never come to know... Where am I, that I have such a poor view of things? And what sort of thing am I that both my outside and my inside are so obscure?