What does it mean to be conscious? Consciousness is the awareness of any and every kind of experience that we can have. Without consciousness there’s nothing - no sense of self and no world.
It’s easy to think that objective reality is revealed to us when we open our eyes. The truth is that all perceptions are acts of interpretation, or informed guesswork.
The term “controlled hallucination” illustrates this point. It emphasizes that everything we perceive is a construction of the brain. One example of this is our perception of color. It has been proven that colors are not objective. Color is a sensation, just like touch. It doesn’t have a physical reality of its own. What we perceive as red in broad daylight might appear black at night.
The idea of controlled hallucination is that this concept applies to everything that we perceive, including our perceptions of ourselves, our bodies and our memories. These perceptions are not random - they’re constrained by the sensory data that we get, which is why we can mostly all agree that a table is a table.
We don’t passively perceive the world, instead we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much from the inside out as from the outside in. This leads to some interesting questions, such as, how much control do we have over our consciousness? And are we able to shape it? Can we artificially recreate consciousness? The answers to these questions may provide even more fascinating insights into our reality.