A while back, I read Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a strange loop". As one might expect from Hofstadter, it's a fascinating book packed with good ideas. However, it happens that I disagree with someone of them. Hofstadter believes that the human brain fundamentally works in an entirely mechanistic, deterministic manner and that all of the mysteries of consciousness can be explained in terms of symbols being triggered by other symbols in the brain. Our subjective "awareness" is, according to Hofstadter, just an illusion - a hallucination. I'm not convinced by this - the concept of a hallucination implies that there is something (someone) there to experience the hallucination. But if a hallucination has an experience, how can it be a hallucination? It's sort of like how the concept of "creating time" is meaningless, because the concept of creation implies a time before and a time after.
If "souls" (or whatever less loaded word you'd prefer to use to mean the part of us which has subjective experiences) are not made of particles or patterns of particles, how do they get distributed so that there's one per human brain? I think that's asking the wrong question, because it presupposes that souls are localized entities like particles. I think there are many other possibilities. Unfortunately because we have no way to do experiments on subjective experience, answering this question seems to be out of the reach of science (at least for the moment).
[...] describe human consciousness (in particular, subjective experience). Some suggest that this means consciousness is an illusion, but this has never been a satisfying answer to [...]