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The Brain Sensing Itself: Our Most Direct Contact with Reality
On mastery of the world through self-perception.
Key Points:
1. Introspection is less mediated than external observation
When you observe the external world, information passes through sense organs, neural transduction, multiple processing stages, and perceptual construction before reaching awareness. When you introspect, neural activity directly becomes awareness of that activity—the brain observing itself with minimal transformation. We can touch reality most directly within our inner experiential worlds, in a non-trivial sense.
There’s no obvious reason why pure thought should unlock nature’s laws — other than the perhaps unsatisfying observation that the brain is the only bit of empirical reality the brain can directly access, mediated by “the mind”.
2. Your thoughts obey physics, which means imagination is constrained by and givens direct insight into physical laws
Whatever you can think corresponds to a physically possible brain state. The internal world follows different rules than external physics (allowing you to imagine flying or time travel), but these are still genuine physical laws governing neural dynamics—associative physics, attentional physics, semantic…
