Most of our experience of the world tends to be counterintuitive. What we perceive to be the seamless stream of consciousness within which we swim turns out to be countless discrete neurological functions that we assemble and reassemble in new and old patterns.
Consciousness is a product of biological processes yet the biological processes that give rise to consciousness are themselves formed by the experience of consciousness.
No people exist within the brain, no photographs, no memories, and no sounds. Yet the sensation of all those things obviously does exist. This is because the perceptual and conceptual world that we inhabit is a world in translation, and indeed our experience of it can only be experienced through translation.
The language of the brain is constructed by electrochemical firings and pathways created by the flow of information along neurons axons and dendrites.
Curiously the function of our brains is formed by a combination of genetic predisposition and learned experience. It is not that we learn how to pour water into a cup because we are taught, as much as that given the possible movements of our wrist and the laws of gravity, we all come to pretty much the same conclusion as to what is the best way to do it.
The more we understand how we ourselves work the stranger the experience of consciousness becomes. Some of the very basic tenets of experience now appear to not be constructed the way we thought: The self, emotions, even thoughts themselves.
The world does not exist as we experience it. Yet in a curious irony it only exists as we experience it. So in order to function as members of a society with shared perceptual and conceptual reality we are obliged to act as if it is entirely real.
Consequently, at the base of our experience of the world is a paradox and a contradiction. Each age has a different belief as to what it is that is beyond the world confined by the body. Due to a rapid advance in imaging techniques our age is undergoing a radical change in what we understand to be out there. Ironically, this is because we have a better understanding as to what goes on within our own cerebral cortex.
—Peter Nadin