Page 86 - Matter: The Other Name for Illusion

as if watching television, and becomes excited, happy, sad, nervous, or feels
pleasure, anxiety or curiosity while watching them? Who is responsible for the
consciousness which is capable of interpreting everything seen and everything
felt?
What is the entity in the brain that has consciousness and throughout life

is capable of seeing all the sights shown to him in a dark, quiet head, that is
capable of thinking, and reaches conclusions and makes decisions in the end?
It is obvious that it is not the brain, made up of water, lipid and protein,
and unconscious atoms, that perceives all this and is responsible for
consciousness. There must be a being beyond the brain. Despite being a
materialist, Daniel Dennett ponders the above question in one of his books:

My conscious thinking, and especially the enjoyment I felt in the
combination of sunny light, sunny Vivaldi violins, rippling branches –
plus the pleasure I took in just thinking about it all – how could all that be
just something physical happening in my brain? How could any
combination of electrochemical happenings in my brain somehow add up
to the delightful way those hundreds of twigs genuflected in time with the
music? How could some information-processing event in my brain be the
delicate warmth of the sunlight I felt falling on me? For that matter, how
could an event in my brain be my sketchily visualized mental image of …
some other information-processing event in my brain? It does seem
impossible. It does seem as if the happenings that are my conscious
thoughts and experiences cannot be brain happenings, but must be
something else, something caused or produced by brain happenings, no
doubt, but something in addition, made of different stuff, located in a
different space. Well, why not? 23
On the other hand, R. L. Gregory questions the existence of the entity in
the back of the brain, which sees all sights:
There is a temptation, which must be avoided, to say that the eyes produce
pictures in the brain. A picture in the brain suggests the need of some kind
of internal eye to see it – but this would need a further eye to see its
picture… and so on, in an endless regress of eyes and pictures. This is
absurd. 24

Materialists who believe that nothing exists except matter cannot
understand this particular question. Who does this "internal eye", which sees
and perceives things seen and reacts to such things, belong to?

84 MATTER: THE OTHER NAME FOR ILLUSION