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how does felt experience arise out of nonsentient matter? The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously termed this the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Your perception of reality is the end result of fancy editing tricks: the brain hides the difference in arrival times. How? What it serves up as reality is actually a delayed version. Your brain collects up all the information from the senses before it decides upon a story of what happens.
It’s possible that these rats somehow feel that they are being manipulated against their will by an outside force, but it seems more likely that their neurochemistry is being altered and thus their desires and fears change:
There are countless examples of other parasites affecting the behavior of their hosts.
One can’t help but wonder what’s truly driving all our own desires and personality traits—especially ones we tend to strongly identify with.
It seems much more accurate to say that consciousness is along for the ride—watching the show, rather than creating or controlling it.
How could an unconscious robot (or a philosophical zombie) contemplate conscious experience itself without having it in the first place?
We can have a full awareness of the usual sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts, absent the sense of being a self who is the receiver of the sounds and the thinker of the thoughts.
There are other ways to suspend the sense of self. Psychedelic drugs—such as LSD, ketamine, and psilocybin—are known to quiet a circuit in the brain
Though it may be impossible for someone who hasn’t experienced something like this to imagine it, consciousness can still persist without an experience of being a self, and even in the absence of thought.
the typical notion of “self,” along with other misperceptions of everyday experiences, can be overcome through meditation training,
Like the flatness of the earth or the solidity of the table, it [the notion of self] has utility at a certain level of scale—socially, linguistically, legally—but thoroughly breaks down when examined with closer scrutiny.
At a 2015 TED conference, Eagleman described the potential future results of sensory substitution, whereby “new senses” are created for people:
the human brain, under the right conditions, can seamlessly integrate foreign objects into its map of what constitutes its body.
Seth refers to our experiences of ourselves in the world as a kind of “controlled hallucination.” He describes the brain as a “prediction engine” and explains that “what we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” In a sense, he says, “we predict ourselves into existence.”
it seems that the same person can have two different answers to a question, along with completely different desires and opinions in general. And even more astonishing is the discovery that the feelings and opinions of each hemisphere seem to be privately experienced and unknown to the other.
The split-brain literature contains many examples suggesting that two conscious points of view can reside in a single brain.
the majority of scientists believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon resulting from neuronal processing.
How can consciousness increase the likelihood of survival if it doesn’t affect our behavior in the typical sense?
We should be as surprised by the reality of our own consciousness as we would be to learn that the latest smartphone is conscious.
