Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 24 of 171
Irreducible subjectivity
As far as we can tell, certain patterns of activity in this distributed network give rise to conscious experience. But fundamentally, this network’s activity is self-contained and the feeling of a unified flow of consciousness you have is not just from the processing of sensory information. The experience you have right now is a unique creation of your brain that has transformed data from your body into something closer to a hallucination. To break down this seemingly obvious point that we will deal with very often in this book and that I myself struggle to understand: the existence of our experience is real, but the contents of this experience exist only in your brain. Some philosophers call this “irreducible subjectivity,” which means that no totally objective theory of human experience may be possible. The contents of your experience are not representations of the world, but your experience is part of the world.…