Mystery of consciousness

“In Western science the existence of matter is often taken for granted, while the existence of consciousness is regarded as mysterious. Consequently, the conventional ‘hard problem’ refers to the difficulty of understanding how consciousness arises from (otherwise, insentient) physical matter, or, in other versions, about the seeming irreducibility of first-person accounts of conscious experience to third-person descriptions of the brain. But in truth, the existence of matter is as mysterious as the existence of consciousness, and there are similarly hard problems in physics. Why, for example, should electricity flowing down a wire be accompanied by a magnetic field around the wire, why should electrons sometimes behave as waves and at other times as particles, and why there should be any matter in the universe at all?” Velmans (2008)

The Twisted Matrix: Dream, Simulation or Hybrid? Clark (2003)

"In normal waking the mode (defined as the ratio between the activity of the two systems) leans towards the aminergic. Whereas in REM sleep, with acetycholine dominating, experience becomes increasingly dissociative, displaying “amnesia, hallucinations, bizarre mentation, anxiety, and loss of volition control” (Hobson, p. 91). All this, we now know, is matched by a shift in regional blood flow from (in waking) dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to (in REM sleep) subcortical limbic structures.” (Clark 2003).

"In REM sleep we are, in a real sense, drugged witless by our own brains. And the cure, as Hobson and Neo would probably both agree, is simple: it is called waking up!" (Clark 2003).

“In a normal Virtual Reality simulation, you cannot bend the rules just by willing it. By the same token, video-gaming would be a whole different sport were the underlying code directly susceptible to the will of the players!" (Clark 2003).