That's an interesting question, though I don't know if we quite have an answer to it.

For instance, here is one paper describing a neuroimaging study on those with alexithymia, measuring the size of the left amygdala: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26275382/

Meditation is linked to increased empathy (causative studies have been done) and is also correlated with reduction of the right amygdala.

That is a flawed premise. It's a two way street—the lanes going in one direction are closed, but the other direction is open. Narcissists experience fear, but they are unwilling to understand others' emotions. (That does not mean they are incapable, though...but according to certain ideas presented by researchers, they tend to only experience what is dubbed "cognitive empathy" rather than its emotional counterpart.)

This whole fat acceptance thing is ludicrous. Obesity costs taxpayers several times more than tobacco use, including secondhand smoke. This is really messed up.

Just wanted to add that this is an absurd discussion to even have in the science subreddit, because David Chalmers is not a scientist, and has no understanding of the workings of the brain (or else he would realize that conscious experience is fully explained via physical means that can be understood and observed). Chalmers's "hard problem" only presents difficulty to people without knowledge of neurology and cognition...because people with knowledge in those fields can and have elucidated the nature and origin of conscious experience via purely physical means.

Science does indeed know "what consciousness is". Perhaps you've been listening to silly old non-scientist David Chalmers, who believes in magic? His entire schtick is ignoring the fact that consciousness can be (and has been) fully explained from a neurological standpoint. You don't need spooky magic for consciousness. In fact, your initial response to me applies far more to Chalmers's unscientific ramblings than to the observable, empirically-verified description of the mechanism of consciousness that has been established over decades of scientific research.

No, it is how the brain works, written in simple terms rather than in technical language.

Those are also inputs in the network. And there most certainly is such thing as that.

All those decisions are determined by previous conditions and experiences. "You" do not make decisions. "You" are a feedback loop. The conscious experience is the joining together in the brain of various sensory experiences...it also ignores the vast majority of sensory input. For the record, neurons fire in a deterministic manner.

That is the colloquial definition of the word. In a scientific context, theory refers to a hypothesis that has been extensively studied and proven to be consistent with all available evidence.

Care to expound a bit?

Consciousness is simply awareness of sensory input.

Consciousness ≠ involvement in decisionmaking. Consciousness is simply awareness of events. In our case, as humans, there is certainly a correlation between past sensations witnessed by the sensory organs and future "output" (i.e. movements, thoughts, etc). In turn, those outputs act as inputs which again influence the outputs, and so on and so forth until cessation of consciousness. The brain is essentially a feedback loop, with the external inputs being constantly filtered (like in the initial pass through our nervous system to the brain, including the regions of the brain responsible for processing sensory information) then re-filtered (cognition). This introduces an appearance of randomness, especially when we examine other people's behavior (as we are often quick to explain our reasons for our own behavior).