Thinker Alfred North Whitehead says that poets are flawed to wax lyrical about nature. As a substitute, they need to congratulate themselves that their minds create all that they understand as fantastic on this planet round them. Nature itself lacks coloration, sound, and scent—it’s merely inert matter devoid of inherent which means. It’s our minds that imbue it with significance.

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey characterizes this course of because the self-elevating sensory experiences to a efficiency: our minds perform as a magical spectacle tailor-made for us. Our world of consciousness is a theater that serves as a commentary on actuality in order that we will consider it. The ache in your finger is excruciating; the candy style in your tongue is pleasant; her offended expression is intimidating. What’s created in your thoughts is what the stimuli reaching your physique imply to you.

Consciousness constitutes a temporally coherent expertise important for motion and planning. The emergence of a mannequin of the world permits the physique to manage itself way more successfully, for instance by permitting the self to direct consideration to totally different elements of the perceived world. That world is a fiction, but it surely nonetheless provides rise to a profitable management mechanism.

A prevalent notion likens consciousness to a stream of ideas, typically described as an inside voice. On this analogy, you’ve one thought at a time. As a counter-image, the poet T. S. Eliot writes that consciousness is like

… the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it’s not heard in any respect, however you’re the music
Whereas the music lasts.

Eliot’s analogy means that consciousness capabilities extra like an orchestra than a single instrument. The assorted processes within the mind—and within the physique—contribute totally different parallel voices to a dense net of tones that collectively kind the music that constitutes consciousness. Your experiences come up from the interplay of all of the elements. Your self doesn’t create the sounds of thought and emotion, however it’s the music itself.

When listening to an orchestra, you possibly can concentrate on the sound of a single instrument. Equally, you possibly can concentrate on one of many voices in your consciousness. The devices complement one another, however typically there may be dissonance between them. The voice in you that desires to eat extra of the scrumptious cake proper now fights towards the voice that thinks about your future well being. Generally one voice wins, typically the opposite.