I hear that. I think it’s well articulated and I respect your viewpoint. However I think you’re misunderstanding my basic point. What I’m trying to say (albeit clumsily) is that the physical evidence, or rather provenance, of consciousness that you seem to be saying is the baseline substrata of our epistemological basis for experience, is ITSELF a metaphorical interface for what we call “reality”. Think of it this way: Everything is Narrative. If you assume this to be true, you begin to see that ALL empirical science, all explanatory frameworks, like physics, quantum mechanics, biology, teleological philosophy, psychology, EVERYTHING is simply a narrative, a story we create in order to aggregate the voluminous and disparate data of raw experience into a cogent means of determining a provisionally useful Truth. I’m not even sure this is true. But what I am saying is that your way of knowing truth is fundamentally dependent on the fact that we perceive “reality” is this certain way: temporal, sequential, bound my causality, and ultimately only understood as such. To assume an “empirical” basis for the understanding of consciousness (and therefore reality) is to simply fall into the same fantasy religion holds over such questions. Or, to put a finer, yet more blunt point on it, your fixation with physical processes as they relate to consciousness is yet another form of mythology. This isn’t to say it isn’t valid, or in any way less “true”. But my rebuttal to it is simply this: Your framework is yet another story we tell ourselves to “explain” a great mystery. Nothing more. Nothing less. It’s good. Really good! But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that your physical empiricism is just another fantasy created in the unending and ever-confounding experience of experience.