I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it's actually arbitrary. In my 20s I broke

I can answer a little bit of the question. Why do rotten eggs smell like rotten eggs and not roses? The answer is: it's actually arbitrary. In my 20s I broke my leg fairly badly. It damaged the nerve, but luckily left the sheath of the nerve undamaged. The end result was that half my foot was paralysed. What I never realised is that if the nerve sheath is undamaged, the nerve will regrow! So slowly over time I started to get feeling back in my foot. I don't know exactly what goes on, but I'd get this sharp shooting pain, like a needle in my foot and slowly after each time, I'd regain a little bit of feeling (I don't know... is that just the nerve endings "reattaching"???) Eventually, I got pretty much all the feeling back... except it wasn't mapped properly. The space between my toes felt like the sole of my foot and various other strangeness. Slowly I got used to it. A few years later, my brain had completely translated everything and the space between my toes felt like the space between my toes. Even though I know it's mapped differently I can't consciously distinguish between the feelings I have now and the feelings before I broke my leg. So a rose smells like a rose because the receptors that are activated when you smell a rose are different from the receptors that are activated when you smell a rotten egg. It's just like the nerve endings between my toes are different than the nerve endings on the sole of my foot. But it's just input for your brain, nothing more. Of course we have an aversion to the smell of rotten eggs, but that's just hard wired -- more input for the brain. There are lots of people who have aversion to smells that other people like. In terms of "consciousness", I think it's likely an illusion of sorts. We experience a kind of continuum of consciousness. In reality, though, there is only an instant. Our awareness is an artefact of our memory. Behaviour couldn't exist without a feedback loop. For those of us who are programmers, this is pretty obvious. In order to have a state machine, the new output needs to not only look at new input, but also its current state. Every instant we exist we are processing new input and also our current state (which seems to prioritise recent inputs). We exist instantaneously, but because we are processing previous data along with new data, it creates an illusion of having existed over a continuum. Additionally, the only reason we have an ego is simply because our data networks are isolated. If I could access the data of another brain in the same way I can access data in my own brain, there would be no way to distinguish between the "two of us". There would be no way to distinguish between "my thoughts" and "somebody else's thoughts". "I" would not exist... or rather "I" would be the "two of us". It's just an artificial distinction based on a lack of ability to access the data. Or at least that's the way I look at it. There is no way to know for sure. It might just be the FSM manipulating me like a puppet.