User blog comment:Edwin Shade/My Hierarchy Of Mathematical Understanding/@comment-32213734-20180111204545/@comment-32213734-20180210191209

By the way, if anyone is interested, here is another argument why I think that thoughts, self-awareness and "self" cannot be real physical things and should be considered as myths: it is believed that thoughts are observed individually, that is only by single person. But all physical things, that is elementary particles and all what is made of them, including brain, can be observed collectively, that is by many people.

Indeed, we cannot observe other's thoughts. (In case someone thinks that someday people will learn to extract data from brain and thus observe other's thoughts: yes, people will learn to extract data from brain, but we will never able to find out whether these data related to thoughts, or this is just data, which are not related to thoughts at all. Because to find out relation between any data and thoughts, we first need to directly observe thoughts themselves at least once, however, it is believed that a person's thoughts can be directly observed only by this person's mind).

So, how do you think, can elementary particles, which can be observed by many people, produce something, which can be observed only by one person? Is it scientific when something is observed by one person, but never observed by anyone else?

It's as if someone said: "There is a penguin which no one can observe except me". How do you think is this penguin real?

(In general, for someone who studies philosophy of mind (and science as a whole), I would recommend rely on logic and scientific method rather than on intuition. I think that these findings may seem very counterintuitive, but technically they are correct).