Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
the brain can construct a vivid virtual world in the absence of any perceptual input. It has the independent neural resources to build a complete, detailed phenomenological analog of reality, including ourselves as actors inside it.
consciousness is more or less the same thing when we’re awake as when dreaming. That is, the brain constructs a conscious phenomenal world, with ourselves as part of that world; this is what we experience, or rather is our experience. The difference between waking and dreaming experience is that the former is responsive to perceptual input coming in via the eyes, ears, and other sensory faculties while the latter is not. Both are virtual realities, but one has the crucial property of being constrained, in real time, by the real world outside the head.
it’s hard to really accept or believe the fact that we as experiencing subjects always inhabit – are actually an element of – a phenomenal world that the brain constructs.
Our conscious subjective realities are very selective takes on what exists outside the head, versions of reality that have been shaped by evolution
From a scientific perspective, conscious experience is epistemically adequate for personal and social purposes, but not a particularly perspicacious rendering of reality.
Neurologist Kevin Nelson explains how the brain slips into a strange state of hybrid consciousness during a near-death experience
Physicist and consciousness researcher, Thomas Campbell, Discusses the nature of reality in terms of consciousness — this video logically and scientifically explains the normal and the paranormal, mind and matter, physics and metaphysics, philosophy and theology.
