An Assemblage of Thought and Sense: What is IT?

At the core of this life, or the process by which we know it⁠—living—is the problem of conscious experience. Our experience is the life we live, the living we do everyday, and every single feeling, thought, or behavior is encompassed by consciousness. Nothing you experience can be experienced “outside” of this often luminous and vital space of the conscious mind for the very same reason that you cannot see your own face. The question is this: What is IT? Briefly, let’s do a simple experiment. Look at your face in a mirror and point at your reflection: what are you pointing at? Is this the way everyone else sees you? Is this the way you see yourself? Are you, the person pointing at the mirror, the same as the person pointing back? In some sense, surely not, that would be ridiculous, and yet it might seem equally ridiculous to suggest the contrary. The point here is to notice that you are always on this side of the mirror and will (hopefully) never be in a position in which your eyes turn themselves around to gaze at your own face (that might be gruesome). Simply put, consciousness, the window through which you experience the world, is the context in which everything in it appears. Like a mirror reflecting everything on its surface, consciousness is the apparent space in which experience is experienced. 

Where does this lead us in the problem of living? Let’s start with the body. In Lawrence Rosenblum’s See What I’m Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses, the two most important insights he explores are the brain’s ability to integrate and process all of the senses together, weaving a web of experience with an assemblage of sensory data, and the remarkable and often mysterious nature of the brain’s non-conscious perceptual functions. As he says, “your brain knows more about the outside world than you do” (Rosenblum, xi). Discoveries in neuroscience support this claim: our consciousness “doesn’t appear to be involved in much of our own behavior, apart from bearing witness to it” (Harris, 26). Through a process called binding, the signals our body receives through its sensory organs are assembled through non-conscious functions allowing our conscious experience to appear uniform and continuous. Additionally, we know that sensory information travels through the world (and our bodies) at different rates, each arriving at different speeds and points in time; “only after all the relevant input has been received by the brain do the signals get synchronized and enter your conscious experience” (Harris, 25). The conscious will, it seems, is the “last to know.”

Rosenblum explores how these interactions between senses present themselves in our experience. The brain is exceptionally adept at multisensory processes, nearly to the degree that it begins to make little sense to demarcate where one sense ends and another begins. In other words, everything is in some way interconnected to facilitate the “final” experience following the binding process. This is perhaps most evident in the study of taste; “the influences of seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling on your perception of taste render it the most multisensory of all your senses” (Rosenblum, 115). Additionally, not only does your experience of how something looks or sounds influence how it tastes (and even vice versa), but your sheer expectations can alter how things taste. Expert chefs effectively utilize all of these elements to produce a complex and unique profile for their dishes, manipulating everything from how it smells and looks to the minute influences of appearances and expectations before the food even reaches your mouth. This is directly related to our problem of consciousness and living: like the spinning of a web, all of our senses in conjunction with our thoughts, emotions, and their interplay actively demonstrate the way in which this experience is put together. What it does not tell us, however, is what IT is. But, it might be more accurate to say that it shows, not tells. 

Let’s go further before returning to the body and redo the experiment we did together at the beginning, this time without the mirror. Extend your arm in front of you and turn your hand to point with your index finger directly at your own face. Now, look in the direction you are pointing, to the space towards which your attention is being directed. Look with your whole body, with your finger extended towards your face, and focus not only with your eyes but with the feeling in or behind your face that you seem to be looking out of. What does this sensation feel like? Where, in your subjective experience, is your head? Everyone will experience something slightly different, but most people will feel a sort of void or empty space where their face should be. It feels almost as if the world is flooding outwards from your senses at the same time as it seems to flow into your body through your senses as you experience it as a whole. Again, this exercise is to point out the appearance of a distance or gap between the viewing subject (you) and the object of the subject (the world)—and if you recall the complex role of your brain in assembling these parts into a single, continuous whole, notice that this too is an appearance in this space of conscious experience. 

When “looking for your head,” it is of utmost importance in doing this task that you put aside any notions of what you think is there, of what you “know” is there, and of what others tell you is there. The challenge is to feel this experiment with your entire experience. By pointing at yourself and “looking for your head”, you are directing awareness back onto itself, turning it 180 degrees; the difficulty in this task comes from the fact that the inspector (you) is always the one inspecting, looking, experiencing—there is no real gap between the one who knows and the object of knowing. This gap itself is, in a way, illusory; that is, it is not real, per se, except for in its appearance. This is most thoroughly understood by theories of direct perception, which attempt to eliminate the separation of the perceiver and the perceived. Consider the role of imagination or expectations in perceiving the world. In regards to the sense of taste, “the influences of smell are so profound that simply imagining a smell can affect what you taste” (Rosenblum, 115). Suppose you see a glass of mysterious orange liquid in front of you. By merely imagining the smell of the drink as the flavour orange, in drinking the liquid it is likely you will actually taste orange, regardless of whether or not it actually is an orange flavoured drink. Here, the simple thought combined with the outward appearance of the orange drink assembles into a complex but unitary experience of drinking an orange drink. This not only highlights the interplay between sensory data and thought in the process of perception but also the incredible non-conscious task of expectations or imagination in modifying the perceived world. 

The general notion that we as humans are “imperfect expert perceivers” is well encapsulated within this concept. Expertly, our bodies integrate our experience within the circumstances and context of an ever-changing environment, perceptually perfect in the sense that this relationship between the world perceived and the perceiver generates a single, immediately known subjective experience. Recall the sensation of turning attention 180 degrees toward itself. Consider whether there is really any space or gap separating the world as you experience it from the sensation of having a head which you look out from? Not really—and if you feel as if there is, notice that, again, this too can only appear in the same space of consciousness as everything else. Furthermore, imperfectly, we consistently fail to notice or pay attention to everything that appears (this would likely be chaos or a kind of sensory overload), and we constantly forget the necessary perspective from which we experience. 

The pointing experiments we’ve done are designed to “point out” this perspective and emphasize the paradoxical direction of perception as a seemingly simultaneous product of outward projection and inward reception. The mistake is to assume that this process of perception, which is perfectly aligned with our general experience of living or conscious experience, is somehow broken up into bits and pieces, separated into disconnected, different sensory routes. As Rosenblum notes, “theories of multisensory perception assumed that cross-sensory influences occurred in the brain upstream from the separate brain regions thought dedicated to the individual senses” (280). The integration of senses into a single sensory experience was assumed to be a product of higher brain functions, differentiating between the information input and the output experienced; this is like suggesting that the binding process is somehow a separate function from the very senses it binds. In actuality, our experience lags behind reality by moments in time undetected by our senses (without binding we may experience a kind of perpetual, perceptual chaos or disarray—some examples include disjunctive agnosia and prosopagnosia). It seems at first glance impossible to direct attention towards itself, to experience consciousness as anything other than whatever it is, and in many ways this is true. However, the directness and immediacy of perception and its product, conscious experience, illuminates their nature as one and the same. 

In highlighting the ever-impressive interplay between senses and the incredible non-conscious, or as Rosenblum calls them, implicit sensory skills of the body, it becomes more and more clear that whatever consciousness is must by extension be immediately known as a product of knowing. As human beings imbued with what seems to be a unique self-awareness matched by no other known being, what constitutes consciousness at its surface—that is, whatever is immediately experienced and thus being known now, in this moment—must also be carefully and perfectly integrated with what lies below the surface (or rather, suffused within it), hidden behind our eyes in the empty or void-like space from which we are always-already looking out. The problem of living, then, of what this life really is as it is experienced, is precisely and solely this. IT is a sometimes magical and sometimes mundane process of looking, not only with the eyes or the interweaving input of other sensory data, and not only with the body, but with the whole world. Your entire immediate environment as it is, like a mirror, is reflected onto the surface of experience with a certain vitality and beauty captured only in this: your life. Aldous Huxley put it rather succinctly: “Everything is novel and amazing.”

Putting aside scientific theories, concrete ideas, or perhaps even logic, simply to think about these thoughts could shift your experience forever, further illustrating the effect of thought on perception and vice versa. I never look at the world the same in each moment. It is always shifting as I am always shifting. I am IT and IT is I. It is as if in each instance of this shimmering experience, as it appears to me on the surface of consciousness, the percept continually swallows the concept whole—always-already becoming one. As it is, this is IT. 

Works Cited

Harris, A. (2019). Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Harper. 

Huxley, A. (1956). Heaven and Hell. Harper. 

Rosenblum, L. D. (2011). See What I'm Saying: The Extraordinary Powers of Our Five Senses. New York: W.W. Norton.