The Phenomenal World Inside the Noumenal Head of the Giant: Linking the Biological Evolution of Consciousness with the Virtual Reality Metaphor

Resumo

In this paper I describe our subjective consciousness from a biological perspective. From this perspective, I suggest that we can describe the phenomenal consciousness as an analog of a “virtual reality” system created by means of biological evolution. This biological virtual system appears to have evolved “in order to” integrate our multimodal afferent stimulus and to generate a self centered subjective space (our subjective daily space) filled of emotional and volitional contents. I also discuss some paradoxes relative to a biological description of consciousness, like the classical “brain inside the vat” paradox, the “zombie” paradox and the “homunculus” paradox. The main conclusion is that we cannot locate the consciousness in our daily subjective space because we, as observers immersed inside the conscious process, cannot observe and locate the conscious processes from outside them. As a result, to us consciousness appears to be located everywhere we observe. However all indirect evidence suggests that consciousness is, primarily, a biological “virtual” process generated by our brain physiology. To deal with this fundamental aspect of our subjectivity (embodied in each observer) I propose a didactic approach to metaphorically “locate” consciousness in the space: “the Giant World Metaphor”. In this didactic metaphor we exist, normally without notice, inside the invisibles “giant brains” belonging to “invisible giants” living in an invisible “giant world” (this giant world is analog to Kant’s noumenal objective world). These objective “invisible giants” generate, inside their “giant brains” the biological virtual systems we daily experienced as our bodies and our external subjective reality. Although deeply “weird” to our daily common sense, this “giant world metaphor” help to put in evidence a fundamental aspect about the problem of consciousness location: even when we observe our heads and brains we are not observing the “real” and objective (in a strict sense) place where consciousness is generated, but rather the indirect experience of our head and brains mediated by their own subjective