Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a boney skull trying to figure what’s out there.
There’s no light inside the skull, there’s no sound either.
All you’ve got to go on are streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be.
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.
Anesthesia, it’s a modern kind of magic.
It turns people into objects, and then, we hope, back again into people.
…for the third time in my life, I ceased to exist.
…my brain was filling with anesthetic… I simply wasn’t there.
I remember a sense of detachment and falling apart.
When you wake from a deep sleep, you might feel confused about the time.
…continuity between then and now.
I simply wasn’t there.
One of the greatest remaining mysteries in science and philosophy.
How does consciousness happens? What happens when it goes wrong?
Now, you might have heard that we know nothing about how the brain and body give rise to consciousness.
There is no world, there is no self: there is nothing at all.
…Conscious experiences of the world around us, and of ourselves within it, are kinds of controlled hallucinations.
The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.
