A few months ago, I looked at my hands and I did not think that they were my hands. They had no belonging to me; they just as well could have been someone else's or no one's hands. I had the vague feeling as well that the rest of my body belonged no less to me or to anyone else than did my hands, but, I think, because I could not see most of the rest of my body, I did not perceive that it existed, and so I did not notice a discrepancy between how it should be perceived and how I actually perceived it. Then I looked at the walls of my bedroom and noticed the edges and corners where the walls met, and I realized I was in a box under a different name. I could not get the edginess and boxiness of the room out of my mind, and I thought that if I went outside I would perceive the borders of the sky, too, as the boundary of a box, and, therefore, I didn't want to and I was afraid to go outside. However, when I looked out my window (out of curiosity), I saw that the sky had no obvious edges like those of my room, and I was not so bothered by it.
A few weeks after the aforementioned event, I looked at my laptop's screen, which was displaying anime, and I saw it as a window into another world. It was real and separate from this world. The borders of the screen were apparent. I was overwhelmed with emotion when I realized this- or when my perspective changed so I could see things this way. It felt like my hand would go straight into that world if I just moved my hand toward it- through the screen, as though the screen were an interdimensional portal. I wanted to put my hand through the monitor, but I was nervous about doing that. This illusion or new perspective may have shattered if my experience- the hand being stopped by the material of the display- contradicted my feelings about how things would be if I had done them. For some reason, I found this difficult to explain. When I looked at the screen, I could both see and not see it as another world.
These experiences, though I found them somewhat disorienting, felt real. They lasted only a short while, and were certainly different from what is normal to me, but nothing was fundamentally "wrong" about them. They illustrate, in my opinion, the fact that reality and selfhood are phenomenal models: simulations of the brain. All conscious experience is a virtual reality. Similar to a playable character in a video game, whose model is controlled by the player to interact with the surrounding environment, your brain creates a model of reality and within this model places its model of yourself. Consciousness is an evolved process. In theory, conscious experience could have evolved or could be created in an entirely different way- think about aliens or AI. The things we experience as "real" are really only processes occurring in the brain, evolved over millions of years, that proved to be useful to our survival.
Thomas Metzinger, in his book, "The Ego Tunnel", says:
A few weeks after the aforementioned event, I looked at my laptop's screen, which was displaying anime, and I saw it as a window into another world. It was real and separate from this world. The borders of the screen were apparent. I was overwhelmed with emotion when I realized this- or when my perspective changed so I could see things this way. It felt like my hand would go straight into that world if I just moved my hand toward it- through the screen, as though the screen were an interdimensional portal. I wanted to put my hand through the monitor, but I was nervous about doing that. This illusion or new perspective may have shattered if my experience- the hand being stopped by the material of the display- contradicted my feelings about how things would be if I had done them. For some reason, I found this difficult to explain. When I looked at the screen, I could both see and not see it as another world.
These experiences, though I found them somewhat disorienting, felt real. They lasted only a short while, and were certainly different from what is normal to me, but nothing was fundamentally "wrong" about them. They illustrate, in my opinion, the fact that reality and selfhood are phenomenal models: simulations of the brain. All conscious experience is a virtual reality. Similar to a playable character in a video game, whose model is controlled by the player to interact with the surrounding environment, your brain creates a model of reality and within this model places its model of yourself. Consciousness is an evolved process. In theory, conscious experience could have evolved or could be created in an entirely different way- think about aliens or AI. The things we experience as "real" are really only processes occurring in the brain, evolved over millions of years, that proved to be useful to our survival.
Thomas Metzinger, in his book, "The Ego Tunnel", says:
Thomas Metzinger said:
