that's my point - your account that the observer as a running narrative or capacity to do so misses the mark - - - the observer is more organic and reality-based than based on a construed fantasy.
Who said the running narrative is a fantasy? Construing nothing but fantasy would have no survival benefit to an evolving species and therefore would not evolve.
I'll again use the analogy to visual processing. Your eye does not receive, from the environment, any direct representation of (for instance) the arrangement of the furniture in the three-dimensional space of the room you're standing in. It receives an ever-changing (as the eye moves) map of brighter and darker areas within a limited field, with some patchy color information mixed in. The rest—regions, patterns, edges, surfaces, shapes, distances, faces, objects in space, non-movement, movement—is filled in via neural computation.
But that doesn't mean the objects and people in the room aren't really there. There would be no advantage, nothing worth the energy expended, in constantly constructing perceptions that don't reflect the material reality within which threats and opportunities occur. A given perceived arrangement of objects in space
could be all or part fantasy—you might, for instance, really be looking at computer graphics on a monitor screen, or a forced-perspective diorama—but in general the method of computed construction is reliable. And when it is unreliable, it is usually unreliable in ways that reflect its evolutionary value, for example being more likely to perceive a face that isn't really there than to fail to notice a face that is.
The constructed narrative of conscious experience is very similar in all respects. The vast numbers of distinct sensory impressions, muscle movements, plans and revisions of plans, and memory associations that occur during routine activities are, via prodigious acts of neural computation, resolved into comprehensible experiences: "I drove to the plaza for lunch, had cream of mushroom soup and half a pastrami sandwich at the salad place, noticed Cheryl from customer relations at the next table, said Hi." Such a narrative
could be a fantasy (the one I just wrote is, which is what fiction writers do), but normally those narratives represent actual reality, summarized in a more useful way.
"More useful" is the key. What chance would you have going through life with only direct experience: "at the 345 millisecond mark, began a slight contraction of the left gastrocnemius muscle (more or less simultaneously with a hundred other ongoing minor muscle movements including those involved in a respiratory inhale that's now 34% complete) in response to the slight increase in yellow coloration that began impinging on the right visual field 23 milliseconds before..." With narrative understanding we can recognize people and things, perceive and predict cause and effect, make plans. We can know that edible sandwiches are available some distance away, we can know not to try to punch or lick Cheryl, we can understand "turn left" in the car without enumerating the necessary sensory inputs and muscle signals required to execute it successfully.
Drunk people, whose consciousness (ability to construct usefully accurate new narrative) is impaired, might fail those same tests. And unconscious people suck at doing pretty much everything. That's because the construed narrative is useful, and its very usefulness demonstrates that it is not fantasy but a handle on reality.
