What makes some part of the world someone?

In The Four Layers, Youssef Ahmad Youssef showed that the debate about consciousness is really four debates, about structure, presence, interpretation, and ground, and that most of its confusion comes from running them together.

The Consciousness Matrix goes into the deepest of those layers and makes a proposal. Reality is a web of correlations and causations.

Some regions of that web are made into wholes by a single integrating principle, and wherever a whole exists, someone is present. Presence is all or nothing; richness comes in degrees; experience is private in its constitution and relational in its boundaries.

Testing the proposal against split brains, dreamless sleep, anaesthesia, artificial intelligence, the self, and death, the book argues that consciousness is universal in its ground and plural in its presence, and that presence can be constructed but never computed.