Consciousness is a dance of information within memory. The process that leads to consciousness is the linking of cause and effect, and later, the emergence of prediction.

When 2d sensory patterns, such as touch or vision, enter the brain, they cascade into memory through time. This matrix of patterns usually contains evidence of an external 3d reality.

As patterns driving muscles, often seem to cause sensory events to flow into memory, these pairings grow into a foundational vocabulary defining 3d space and time. The brain becomes increasingly and reflexively able to predict, from prior experience, what type of 3d reality subsequent triggering 2d patterns might belong to.

To the brain, the foundational components of prediction, through space and time, are the collection of patterns that drive the muscles. That can connect any point on the body (usually the hands) to any point in external 3d space.

And any incoming sensory patterns are reflexively aligned to that map of muscle scripts, to become a prediction of 3d space. Subsequent physical movement will automatically test those predictions.

And when muscle action leads to predictable sensory effects, the memory structures are reinforced and they gradually become 'beliefs'. This is the 'dumb' process that leads ultimately to higher consciousness.

Since the structure that is ultimately discovered through this process, is a representation of the higher level causes for our 3d reality. That is a 4th dimensional platform that can witness a 3d model of reality through a single serial perspective of space and time.

A genetically encoded 'aesthetics' subsequently interacts with that platform to guide our priorities in thought and action - through the subjective experience of emotion. The ego is a conceptual metaphor attached to the physical body that lays claim to this process.

If you see an apple, your brain can predict a series of muscle patterns that can connect your hand to it. If you were blind, and were holding the apple, your mind could predict the effect of sliding your fingers toward the stem.

The sensory patterns invoke a prediction of subsequent sensory patterns connected by a matrix of muscle patterns defining 4d space (many connected 3d spaces).

The wider 3d reality, including animated objects are extensions of the same process through scaling and metaphor. When language tags become a part of the environment, they too can become a part of the 'dumb' prediction process, leading to simulations of space and time driven by narrative as the 'higher' cause.

Information has properties far beyond the scope that physical modeling or metaphor can be used explain. Yet that's all our minds have to work with when we're bound to the realm of rationality.

Emotion, ego, subjectivity etc. are all information processes beyond the realm of rationality or metaphor to explain in terms of physical cause and effect processes. And so they seize upon the physical body as metaphor. As a means to 'embody' the identity of the witness.