You cannot reduce or hand-wave consciousness away by calling it illusory, or by reducing it to neural activity. You can try, but you'll just be stringing words

You cannot reduce or hand-wave consciousness away by calling it illusory, or by reducing it to neural activity. You can try, but you'll just be stringing words together to make nonsense. Every one of us experiences consciousness - subjectivity, qualitative awareness, 'what it is like to be a me' - directly. We gain one type of knowledge about consciousness by studying and poking the brain, and by observing people with abnormal brains. But that can only take us part of the way. We gain another kind of knowledge about consciousness by making subjectivity into an object. We can do that via means such as meditation, LSD, DMT, mushrooms, marijuana, some types of physical exertion, and perhaps more esoteric means like astral travel, or involuntarily by near-death experiences. These give insights by allowing us to become aware of awareness, to perturb, or to side-step normal consciousness.