The ever-present algorithm liked yesterday's content and is just bursting with suggestions for today's musings so here goes. The physical underpinning of reality is just a formalization of relations between more than 10 and less than 100 ratios describing physical forces. They are a statement about what we perceive, but we haven't operationalized perception, so we have no ground to build upon. I had completely forgotten that this can be referred to as "The Hard Problem" of consciousness, and as I am engaged in consciousness studies, it requires mention. George Musser gives it a shot here, but his survey of currently popular research terms doesn't exactly turn the search for a foundation on its head. I think we can make a little further progress and stop putting Descartes before the horse, by refuting Cogito Ergo Sum and de-identifying thoughts from the thinker.
The Musser article and scientistic analysis of consciousness, in general, are not doing a very good job of separating the subject and object of consciousness. It's probably because given the scary proposition that they are nothing the researchers involved have fallen back on the identification of self as one's thoughts. The idea we are a mind piloting a meat and bone mech and that our minds are separate from the external world. Spend enough time in meditation and you will realize that this is not the case.
Your thoughts are as external as the wall on the far side of the room. The root of your consciousness is witnessing those thoughts and usually half-dozing at the same time. You need to understand the mind is external to the Self and is something being observed, while it is also reacting to the being witnessing it. A thought is an object more gaseous than a '59 Edsel or a stapler but it's still an object, it just has the benefit of being closer in space-time to the witness of mind. The field of observable objects is as large as creation and continuous and usually, you only perceive the part closest to you, but it seems to be a little faster and more interesting than the farther-out bits. It has the immediacy of perception, so seems important, but it's just variation in the object field and that's where relativity creeps into the definition needed for the hard problem. We need a formalized rational description of subject-object relations in the same way we need an abstracted statement of relationships between forces decoupled from measurement units based on the length of a king's foot. Perhaps it's just the speed of thoughts being accelerated around the core of consciousness as a function of distance that makes it seem like we have a personal mind, but the Hard Problem cannot be solved unless we operationalize duality in the subject-object split.