BY VICTOR S. JOHNSTON
Most of us believe that we live in a world full of sounds, colors, smells, and tastes because that’s what we experience every day of our lives and there appears to be no reason to think otherwise. However, to understand the human mind we need to abandon this naïve realism and come to accept the fact that our conscious experiences depend on the nature of our evolved neural organization, and not on the actual nature of the external world that evokes those experiences. This idea is so contrary to our common sense that few rational people would consider such a proposition to be an important insight that is essential for understanding our functional mind, but it is.
Although the external environment is teeming with electromagnetic radiation and air pressure waves, without consciousness it is both totally black and utterly silent. There is absolutely nothing that we can see, think, feel, or know that does not depend on the workings of our conscious mind. It is involved in every aspect of our daily lives; it defines who we are and the way we experience the world around us.