Consciousness 02

Most people will agree that consciousness comes to our bodies through our brains.
My brain is sitting in a closed box made of bones and it has no way of "seeing" the outside world but through electrical impulses that it receives from our sense organs. Furthermore it can output electrical signals to our muscles to interact with the world outside.
My brain has learned to distinguish the impulses from my ears from those from my eyes, my nose and other senses and has given meaning to these.
My brain, or rather my consciousness forms an image of the outside world based on these electrical impulses that it receives.
But this outside world may not even exist. It is quite possible that my brain is lying on a table in a lab and is being fed electrical impulses from some large computer, making me think that there is an outside world that I'm interacting with. Comparable with a VR-headset.
I see myself as a human body, and I see many others like mine. I assume therefore that they are like me and that is why I think I have a skull with a brain in it. But even that assumption cannot be proven. I may not even have a brain at all and be just a program running on a computer.

Is there anything that we can know about reality?
Yes, we know that what we see and interact with is created by our consciousness and may reflect another reality.
What I mean by that is that either our consciousness creates all perceived reality out of thin air, or the things we see do have some existence in one way or another. These are the only two options.
In both cases there exists some reality in which our consciousness is something. It can be something physical or just some process; a sequence of states as in a running computer program. It is impossible to conceive of a process without any physical existence. Even something completely abstract such as a sequence of states requires something to be in those states.
The question then whether or not our perceived reality is based on an actual reality has to be answered in the positive.
For example, I stand in a room and see a table. Now I walk outside so I no longer see that table. When I return in that room I again see the exact same table. So whatever created the image of that table has "remembered" that table so it could re-appear when I re-entered that room. That "memory" is the actual reality on which my perceived reality is based.
So here are the things that we have now established for certain:
- My consciousness creates my view on some actual reality
- My consciousness exists in this actual reality


Now comes the hard part.
In our perceived reality, we could theoretically run a program that is conscious and creates its own universe in which it "lives" based on processes running on our computer. If that is how our consciousness operated it would be an endless chain. Our consciousness would run on a computer in the perceived reality of another consciousness etc. The only way to avoid this is to assume that our consciousness is the actual reality.
This means that everything we see is processes that constitute our consciousness.


--- I will try to make that last paragraph a bit easier to consume, later on.
--- (stay tuned)