Consciousness

I'm renewing my interest in this intractable subject, reading a book by Susan Blackmore. Thinking about the notion of a persisting self led me to realise that conscious awareness is a fleeting thing. Consciousness only exists in the present moment. I was conscious, at intervals, for all my life up to now, but all that remains is memory.

When I consider how memory is retained, it seems to me that it must be in physical form, stored in configurations of protein structure, for example.

There is no gap between the world and our experience of it. The world, so to speak, flows straight into our bodies through the senses, by sampling. The only gap is an 'explanatory gap'. We still don't know what the specific mechanism of consciousness is, in the brain.