It has to be quite clear at this point that the world we experience is an entity that cannot be dissociated from our own minds. We cannot be absolutely sure about anything but our own conscious experience and its contents. Therefore, in my phenomenalistic view, all that exists is this exact moment of conscious experience we are immersed in. Simply put, I uphold the view that "the universe is the size of human experience".
As was argued before, the simulator we inhabit depends on sensory information and it only needs to update now and then to maintain the illusion that we're living in a solid and stable reality.
This perceptual simulation evolves coherently as it continuously integrates new sensory information.
We can only know the universe through a miniature model of itself which is nothing but our own minds, and if this wasn't enough, the world we tend to assume as the substantial and authentic external reality is also an extension of the human consciousness that exists for evolutionary reasons, just as Carl Sagan said once: "We are a medium through which the universe can know itself".
If someone asked me for an intuitive way of putting this I'd say that phenomenology is actually how our world simulation looks from the very inside.
Whenever we aim to describe the phenomenology of human experience what we're actually doing is to describe the insides of our world simulations.
Perception has two priorities, the most important is to provide analogical representations of the environment based on sensory input, and the second one relies on predictions, which constitute a subtle but not less significant part of our world simulation.
As was previously argued, an analogical representation based solely on sensory input isn't enough to meet all the needs that perception seeks to fulfill. Another but not less important function of the brain is to anticipate the tendencies of the environment that it represents. This counteracts the partial blindness of world simulations by allowing them to include an internal record of things that are no longer perceivable.
Anything that resides beyond the grasp of the senses is technically nonexistent for a representation that depends entirely on sense data. Then, anything beyond the sense's grasp is predicted instead of represented.
Everything that remains hidden from the senses is expressed within our world simulation as a void that could be filled instead with nothing but our expectations, beliefs, and assumptions concerning the world.
As portrayed in this picture, our world simulation fills the gaps with what it seems adequate to expect from the environment, based on previously observed tendencies or patterns.
This would mean that we are actively rendering a "hypothetical universe" that is expected to reside beyond the walls of the precise moment of sensory experience we are immersed in, upon nothing but expectations and predictions. Among the things we are actively sculpting within our heads, few of the most significants would be:
- The history of Humankind (the past in general)
- Modern cultures and societies
- The individual minds of other human beings
- The future
- Any event that's heard of instead of directly known through lived experience
All your thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and assumptions about reality, exist within the boundaries of your private world simulation.
These sophisticated movies we inhabit, which we denominate "conscious experiences", are made of neuronal activity. Even our deepest assumptions about reality reside within the boundaries of our world simulation, rendered by the neurons. Everything we think, and "feel is the case", is part of the internal structure of our private world simulation.
"So...Pretty much you are not mad at anyone. You're only mad with the private predictions you've built of other people, you know, all of those internal perceptual copies of other human beings that you include within the sophisticated ecosystem of your world simulation".
"Everyone is an extension of your private world simulation since, you know, indirect theory of perception and so on..."
At this point, the reader may consider the world of its phenomenal experience as nothing but its own brain's activity masquerading itself as the authentic and extracranial external world. Acknowledging that in reality, we can only exist within the limits of the brain, just as fishes cannot live outside of the water.
Strangely, people who are not familiarized with this subject tend to be more convinced of this premise when the topic in question is dreams. It's rather easy to think that everything we experience in dreams is nothing but our internal brain activity masquerading itself as a somewhat solid and stable world.
The brain is not inside of you, as you believed, but you're inside the brain, and everything you're experiencing is nothing but its internal activity. And everyone else is an extension of your consciousness. Replicas furnished with your internal model of them as having a world simulation of their own.
As I have previously emphasized, everything that makes up the contents of our consciousnesses exists within the confines of enclosed, finite, and private systems called world simulations.
In essence, you're the world of experience. For example, let's imagine you make someone feel bad or upset by throwing a hurtful comment, that perhaps you weren't even aware was offensive, but now you feel a little bit of guilt, however, you keep implicitly assuming that you are a completely free and emotionally detached individual, but as the hours go by, you realize that the empathetic function of your mind has started to betray those beliefs. Even though you aren't representing that person anymore via sensory input, you still incorporate an internal perceptual copy of themself that also includes an internal model of their hypothetical mind wandering around in your world simulation, rendering entire mental scenes of themself feeling awful for what you said. That's a poison that starts contaminating the walls of your experience, because nothing is outside of your mind as you believed it was. You're trapped inside your subjective-conscious experience, which is quite everything you can access, including the things you think don't concern you. Obviously, there are a ton things that we can't change, but which consume a significant part of our attention and energy. In this example, the mere act of assuming or inferring another's person mindset has already an effect on the structure of our private world simulation. If we are not enough self-reflecting, introspective, and emotionally intelligent persons, we may end up sharing the four walls of our private conscious experience with parasitic entities.
"The problems of the world are also your problems because you are always rendering them in your mind."
I enjoy thinking of world simulations as private, bounded, and isolated universes where, well...the only inhabitant is you. And the observer and what's being observed are indeed different local components of the same unified entity that is our world simulation. There's no dramatic distinction between the experiencer and the world of experience.
In my "private-phenomenal bubble" I appear located right at the center of the world of my experience, as if I were the protagonist of my own movie, while you appear as the analogous of a secondary character to which I don't have a direct nor explicit access to their "hypothetical internal movie" of which (I infer) you exist as the main character within it, and I as the secondary instead. The bubble where I stand also includes different properties and phenomenal tokens that seem only exclusive to me, impossible to share with others. This reinforces the indirect realism arguement, implying that each of our brains is representing and rendering slighly different inputs, giving the illusion of individuality within the "same world".
Now I would like to bring up an interesting state of consciousness. Falling in love. Precisely, the experience of having a crush. Let's examine a moment of experience whereby you are lucky enough as to go on a date with your crush, and have the opportunity to know her better while enjoying the day by strolling through the park.
If you analyze and dissect the experience of perceiving her, besides the phenomenal surface of her appearance, you'd realize that a significant part of her is made of nothing but your own frustrations and expectations.
Behind her perceptual-phenomenal avatar is "her mind", which is also your brain activity masquerading itself as so, as it exists as a based-prediction percept rendered within the boundaries of your private world simulation, whereas her authentic world simulation resides beyond the walls of your subjective conscious experience, within her genuine brain, housed by her real-physical skull, where she also includes a perceptual-phenomenal replica of yourself, mostly composed and parameterized by her own standards and narratives, as her brain tries to simulate your brain.
In the same way..."Other's minds" is also our brain's activity masquerading itself as predictive perceptual models.
Personal note: I must not mistake the minds of others with my own mental processes.
Neurophenomenology and its implications
It is easy to assimilate these ideas if we see them through the lens of neurophenomenology. This branch of study suggests that the contents of our conscious experience correlate with the brain's activity.
This suggests that the world of our conscious experience corresponds with a cluster of brain activity, revealing its nature as a perceptual replica modulated by this sophisticated machine. As presumably inferred, all the properties seen in the world of our experience have to be correlated with certain patterns of cortical activation.
Although there's a huge debate about the resemblance between phenomenology and the brain's structure, there's enough evidence to indicate there's a clear correlation. The concept of "world simulations" presents neurophenomenology in a somewhat fancy and accurate way.
The concept of world simulation provides a bridge between the contents of conscious experience and the brain. As it has been discussed on multiple occasions, human phenomenology exhibits certain properties and behaviors that suggest a strong correlation with the brain's functioning. This also reinforces the indirect realism arguement.
You'd realize that the neuron's activity is the medium or the substance that sustains the universe of our conscious experience, the contents of human phenomenology.
The structure and properties of a moment of conscious human experience are correlated with the intracranial brain's activity. Therefore, and as suggested previously, it wouldn't be odd to argue that the world of our conscious experience is nothing but our brain activity masquerading itself as the authentic external environment since its function is of a model or representation —indirect realism—.
When the brain's activity suffers an alteration, the contents of our consciousness get directly affected too.
An overexcitement in the visual cortex, for example, appears in the world of our experience as an evident distortion. The distortion presents itself as a completely dynamic scene of shapes and figures covering the surfaces of the structures of our conscious experience, while the modern scientific method can only register it as a spike of activation in such cortical area.
This playlist includes multiple audio-visual representations of the phenomenological description above, commonly reported under the influence of psychedelics. Psychedelic drugs tend to stimulate multiple areas of the brain's cortex at once, which appear in the phenomenal world as a wide range of distortions, and emergence of exotic phenomenal properties. Sounds, textures, colors, and shapes, become evidently perturbed by the overexcitement of neurons.
When we look at the neurons firing and the cortical areas activating, we're actually registering and contemplating how the brain encodes the information that corresponds with our conscious experience but not how it renders it.
There's to be a fancy way in which brain operations account for the volumetric and sophisticated design of human phenomenology.
Human consciousness is a private and isolated "bubble" that's modulated by the brain. This bubble instantiates our world simulation.
We only have access to a private virtual model of the inescrutable extracranial environment, which is our conscious experience, sustained by our nervous system.
The world around us, and our phenomenal selves are made of brain activity.
If we shut down the brain, the world of our experience fades out. The brain is somehow sustaining our entire existence as we all know it. It's essential to understand where we're standing.
The contents of our conscious experience correspond with a model sustained by the brain. We are the model.
Lehar, S. (2013). In The world in your head a gestalt view of the mechanism of conscious experience. Preface, Psychology Press, Taylor and Francis Group.
Perception works in function of isolated models that are covered with several layers of biological tissue that can keep the internal system updated with information that comes from the external, extracranial environment.
Perception could be defined as the generation and optimization of analogical representations in an isolated space, where these can be used to shape external responses and behavior. The brain is in essence, a computer specialized in rendering whole models complemented with predictions about the organism's conditions, along with preparing and orchestrating outputs or responses throught its biological extensions —the physical body—.
The fact that you are having a complete human conscious experience right now, which includes the world, the textures, the sounds, the sensations, the colors, the shapes, the concepts and mental images you render in your mind, even the whole universe, the stars, the internal layers of this planet, the history of humankind, all of these things, only indicate that you are inhabiting a functional brain.
A world simulation includes multiple layers or levels. Boundaries within boundaries, so to speak. The limit of our vision is the most the eyes can reach, like the farthest things in our visual field or the most intricate perceivable detail that we could be aware of on its contents. Beyond the walls of visual and auditory experience, we'd find the phenomenal architecture of predictive and a-modal percepts masquerading themselves as the world, the universe, and reality. Beyond those it resides the internal surface of our world simulation; the horizon of our phenomenology.
The Phenomenological Paradigm
If we want to take conscious experiences seriously, we should recur to the phenomenology, which is a branch of study specialized to the description of conscious experience's structures and properties.
Phenomenology focuses on the lived experiences of human beings, as they intrinsically appear from the first-person and subjective perspective. In other words, phenomenology starts from the most evident, basic, and primary thing, which is conscious subjective human experience, the only thing that we can be absolutely sure exists.
Phenomenology seeks to dissect conscious experiences and unveil their very nature.
On the other hand, we have neurophenomenology, which is the coalition of two branches of study (neuroscience and phenomenology). This area seeks to unveil the correlation between consciousness and brain activity. It focuses on the mechanisms in the brain responsible for the sophisticated architecture and qualities of human conscious experiences, looking for hints of how brains might make the mind, and how they render and maintain conscious experiences.
I think phenomenology can be considered a reference point for all branches of study since the root of all knowledge is human-conscious experience.
Human experience is the base of any primary understanding.
We, humans, tend to dissociate ourselves from the world we perceive, leading to currents of thought such as objectivism, which for phenomenology is nothing but an idealization, an image rendered within our minds.
The objective world is inferred from the comfy seat of the phenomenal subjective human experience. In other words, the external world is supposed rather than perceived directly.
By mere introspection, we can reach the same conclusion. What's the thing we all share in common, and can be absolutely sure it exists? Phenomenal Experience must be it. Phenomenal experience is considered to be the most fundamental pillar of the human condition, and it is in essence the root of all knowledge and understanding.
After all, as if it were an indispensable requisite, we have to be fully immersed in the human experience to be able to fire the spark of intellectual pursuit. The cognitive abilities we enjoy and take for granted can only be found in the sophisticated console of the human mind, which is where all of us stand.
Subjective-phenomenal experience is the most intimate way in which the universe presents itself.
I'd argue that consciousness is what gives value and meaning. If we think about it, everything revolves around the fact that we're conscious beings. Everything that science does is meaningful for it focuses on the effects it has on the phenomenal human experience (the lifeworld).
Phenomenology: Experience
"I'm walking in the park while eating a cone of Ice cream. It's a partly cloudy day. I can feel the warmth of the sun over my back and shoulders, hearing the chirps of birds in the distance, and over my head. I can also hear the noise of my steps as I walk on gravel. Enjoying the pleasant flavor of strawberry in my mouth, while also fixing my attention on a small itch right below my ankle. A sudden and cold blow of air hit my face, but nothing can bother me as much as the fact I'm taking a biology exam tomorrow, which I can't help but to feel anxious."
That's an example of an experience. If we look at an experience, what we would see is the world, the objects around us, the sensations, the feelings, the emotions, the thoughts, and the ideas we have about the world. Experience embodies all of these things. Experiences are what make up our lives, the lifeworld, the human condition.
On the other hand, "consciousness" is a sophisticated term to refer to the very fact we're having experiences, the fact that there's a qualitative, and intrinsic event of which we are aware, and how things appear to us in direct experience, that the subcomponents of my experience are happening at once within the same moment of experience. The term "conscious experience" emphasizes the connotation of experience as a matter of study in philosophy.
Therefore, conscious experiences would be defined as the intrinsic and qualitative way in which the things and events of human life present themselves.
The overall conscious-human experience is switched by the term "world simulation", and phenomenology is simply the method that's used to map and describe its architecture. As mentioned before, world simulationism comes primarily as a fashionable concept to illustrate neuro-phenomenology.
Neuroscience is the study of the brain, and phenomenology is the study of conscious experience.
Neurophenomenology is the union between these two branches of study. The brain and consciousness are considered to be correlated with each other. The theory suggests that minds are what brains do. The conscious human experience and brain activity are the same thing, both are isomorphic.
This leads to indirect realism, which suggests that our experience of the world is indirect rather than direct for multiple complicated reasons. That phenomenal human experience, which embodies the world we see, hear, touch, and feel, corresponds with a model that the brain is instantiating. In other words, the world we experience is the brain activity masquerading itself as the authentic external world because it is a representation. This framework is known as representalism or indirect realism, as opposed to direct or naive realism. The model is what we see, and the authentic world is inscrutable and inaccessible. The properties and features of conscious experiences correlate with the brain's activity configurations or modes of operation.
The neurons are the architects and computer engineers of experience. Neurons sculpt the sophisticated architecture of the phenomenal-subjective-human experience.
Direct realism is phenomenologically evident in the world of our conscious experience, but it's because phenomenology can only describe the insides of world simulations since it is its terrain of study. World simulations are where conscious human subjective experience occurs.
The Indirect Theory of Perception
By mere examination, we can conclude that perception is a virtual and indirect process, rather than an immediate and direct one. There are a ton of constraints in perception. The first one is that the brain is covered by multiple layers of biological tissue, including the skull and the sensory surface. This implies that the brain is an isolated system that has to monitor things remotely.
This also means that the objects of the extracranial environment never get in contact with the brain. The brain can only become informed about external objects remotely and virtually. Let's think of an apple for instance. The apple never touches the brain, nonetheless, the brain still manages to become aware of the apple's existence. However, even if you were somehow able to remove the brain from the body and place it right next to an apple, the brain wouldn't have a single clue about the presence of the apple.
The neurons that constitute the brain don't know there's an apple because they can only monitor the world through sensory input in the form of electrochemical impulses. If we want the apple to be perceived by the brain, then we have to translate the apple into the code that the brain understands. This inevitably forces us to rely on representations. The apple can't get into the brain unless it's in the form of electrochemical potentials.
The brain is made up of very tiny critters called "neurons". All neurons work together as an intricate matrix. The job of neurons is to render and optimize an online virtual model of the remote extracranial environment. They are all constantly working within the skull, to control the enormous biological robot they inhabit.
Bear in mind that the brain is a machine made of nothing but glia, neurons, and tissue, and it only computes the language of electrochemical potentials. So, again, how can the brain, in such a condition, become informed about the things that exist beyond the walls of the skull and the sensory surface? Perception is subtler and quite bizarre, it is indirect.
The sensory organs are responsible for transducing external signals into electrochemical impulses. This sensory information is promptly sent into the brain, whereby all the sections involved in the cortex render a perceptual replica of what's going on in the external world, based on that sensory input. So, what the brain's doing is to simulate and predict the cause of the sensory input. The brain is actively rendering a simulation of the extracranial environment that is finely optimized to guide behavior, so it can benefit the survival and fitness of the entire organism.
Perceptual Abnormalities
For example, the wall you see in front of you is a perceptual replica made of the neuron's activity. When the neurons get perturbed, the perceptual replica that they sustain reflects the distortion, in this case, the wall you see in front of you. The 2-D tessellations that appear on the wall, as if someone has set a projector somewhere in the room, demonstrate that you live within the model the neurons render.