Perception and Consciousness

Many experiments in neuropsychology show that our consciousness is the result of a “best guess” by our brain, based on what previous experience allows it to infer and interpret from the stimuli that it receives. Consequently, our consciousness can be tricked in believing, for instance, that a fake hand is part of our body, as shown in [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyu7v7nWzfo). In this way, it can be said that: “We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it.” (ref)

This makes it necessary to distinguish, more than we are used to, our consciousness from reality. We experience reality through our perception, and this process is in large part defined by the inherent structures of our biological being (brain and body). Firstly, we can only perceive certain aspects of reality, through certain perceptual instruments that determine what these aspects are (where they are located and what type of data they can convey). Secondly, unconscious processes, based on this perception, select and shape what reaches our consciousness. Our interface with reality is both conscious and unconscious : we cannot equate our consciousness with that interface, let alone with reality. The unconscious part remains, by definition, outside of our direct experience (or consciousness), but can be inferred from this kind of scientific experiments.

In the same way, scientific knowledge about reality can be established that is inaccessible to our consciousness. But although scientific methods reveal other aspects of reality, these are not less determined by the perceptual instruments (most often, machines, and the ideas used to build them) employed in the process. Ultimately, they also have to be brought to our consciousness, through a particular type of linguistic exposition (scientific discourse), to “exist” for us. Albeit this existence more abstract than consciousness, it is no less self-determined (and here I will leave aside further examination of science as a particular case of perception).

What we call “reality” thus appears to be in large part a human construct, and this large part is all we know, and could ever know, of the world. Of the world, we only access what our selves construct, in both conscious and unconscious ways from our perception. What we conceive of as “real” is the conscious part of this self-determined process of accessing the world through very specific means.