In fact there's a potent new theory(1) that human consciousness (and probably all mammalian "consciousness") is just a memory system involving some form of loss

In fact there's a potent new theory(1) that human consciousness (and probably all mammalian "consciousness") is just a memory system involving some form of lossy compression. Your sense of awareness happens ~20-50 ms after the memory is created. A lot of life is buffering and filtering, and reading that lossy record is very much who we are. Einstein's brain must have been amazing at throwing away information about the natural world. (1) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36178498/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36178498/