I have no objection to the idea that consciousness is made of many components. However, I think the interesting jump the author makes, which I'm not fully prepa

I have no objection to the idea that consciousness is made of many components. However, I think the interesting jump the author makes, which I'm not fully prepared to follow, is to presume that careful phenomenological observation will give us the insights needed to create a new observer. He mentions that in the course of meditation, you learn to "distinguish all the components of your consciousness." I think that might be "many" rather than "all". There's a lot we can learn from meditation, but I think these lessons are mostly about how to work with the minds we have, rather than how to create new minds. It's not as though centuries of serious Buddhist meditators arrived at a recipe for creating new consciousness. Why might the subjective, internal, phenomenological approach not be enough? Having a body, feeling your body, and using your body might let you learn deeply what it means to have a body. But if you want to build a new body, you'd better spend some time looking in microscopes and analyzing proteins and a thousand other things. The experiential view isn't enough. Objective exploration of the real world is needed. And setting aside how one should go about acquiring information about how minds work, is the question of whether we're equipped to arrive at an operational conceptualization given that information. He talks about animals, drugged or impaired humans and heathy humans as all having fundamentally different cognitive capabilities. I can do addition in front of a dog with an abacus, a chalk board, etc, but it won't conceptualize addition. It's not obvious that just because we have language and tools and symbolic reasoning and social cognition that our particular ape brains are going to be able to hold the concepts of how minds work.