Somehow, within each of our brains, the combined activity of many billions of neurons, each one a tiny biological machine, is generating a conscious experience. And not just any conscious experience, your conscious experience right here and right now. How does this happen? Answering this question is so important, because consciousness for each of us is all there is. Without it there’s no world, there’s no self, there’s nothing at all.
In the story I’m going to tell you, our conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations that happen with, through and because of our living bodies.
OK, so what’s going on here? The remarkable thing is the sensory information coming into the brain hasn’t changed at all. (All that’s changed is your brain’s best guess of the causes of that sensory information.)
