Page 152 - The Truth of the Life of This World

it.
Since there is no physical distinction between the setting of a dream
and the setting we call real life, when in "real life" we are asked the same
question of "Where do you see?" it would be equally meaningless to
answer, "In my brain." Under either condition, the entity that sees and per-
ceives is not the brain, which is after all only a hunk of nerve tissue.

So far, we have kept referring to how we watch a copy of the external
world in our brains. An important result is that we can never know the
external world as it actually is.
A second, no less important fact is that the "self" in our brains who
observes this world cannot be the brain itself, which is like an integrated
computer system: It processes data reaching it, translates it into images,
and projects them on a screen. Yet a computer cannot watch itself; nor is
it aware of its own existence.
When the brain is dissected to search for this awareness, nothing is
found in it but lipid and protein molecules, which exist in other organs of
the body as well. This means that within the tissue we call "our brain,"
there is nothing to observe and interpret the images, constitute conscious-
ness, or to create the being we call "ourselves."
In relation to the perception of images in the brain, perceptual scientist
R.L. Gregory refers to a mistake people make:
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 pic-
ture… and so on in an endless regress of eyes and pictures. This is absurd. 20

This problem puts materialists, who hold that nothing is real except
matter, in a quandary: Who is behind the eye that sees? What perceives
what it sees, and then reacts?
Renowned cognitive neuroscientist Karl Pribram focused on this impor-
tant question, relevant to the worlds of both science and philosophy, about
who the perceiver is:
Philosophers since the Greeks have speculated about the "ghost" in the
machine, the "little man inside the little man" and so on. Where is the I - the
entity that uses the brain? Who does the actual knowing? Or, as Saint Francis

150 The Secret Beyond Matter