"How do you know you exist? Seeing, hearing, loving, fearing, dreading, dreaming, imagining. Those are all different types of conscious experience. When I see something or hear something, my supposition is, of course, that this is reality, but it's not reality. All we see and all we hear and all we touch, etc, is always mediated by our senses and through our brains. That is very much different in each individual."
"We live inside this Perception Box, all of us. And so when something changes in a transformative experience and you expand the walls of your Perception Box, you interpret it differently from before. So you sort of become more curious, you believe you have agency, you believe you can make difference in the world. And that is a much more positive attitude, a much more adaptive, beneficial attitude to people."
Consciousness comprises awareness of self and others together with arousal, driven by brainstem mechanisms necessary for being conscious but not for experiential content. Sensory inputs are always mediated by individual brains, producing subjective perceptions contained within a personal Perception Box. The neocortex provides the rich content of love, fear, dreaming, and imagination. Most people assume perceptions directly reflect external reality (naive realism). Transformative experiences can expand the Perception Box, altering interpretation, increasing curiosity and a sense of agency, and fostering more adaptive attitudes, contentment, ease, and belonging in the world.
Read at Big Think
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