According to Michael Gazzaniga (“The Mind’s Past”), our brain devices will a motion before our consciousness knows it. (These are experiments by Benjamin Libet.) Somehow this is even more disturbing than the extensive perceptual processing of vision – that we “see” not what is out there, but largely what the brain processes present to us, based only slightly on data coming from the outside.

Both facts are disturbing, though. We like the naive realism of seeing the world as it is, not some elaboration that tries to make sense of it. But the efferent motor signal process is more disturbing than the sensory elaboration. It reduces freewill to complete nonsense, a mere illusion. Our own brain is deceiving us, like a traitor within.

Yet there is a strange twist. We study brain neurophysiology as if it is an outside object and we are the observers. The study reveals to us that the “we”, the subject that studies the object (the brain) is an illusion created by that very brain, supposedly the object of study. Subject studies object, but object creates subject. The subject is merely an illusion that the object creates, so how can the illusion study its creator and come to conclusions about it? It is a twist like intransitivity, like a strange loop, even like the Cretan liar paradox.

Does this lead to nonsense, a contradiction ruled out by rigid logic? But contradictions are now allowed in the Cretan liar paradox: if it’s true, it’s false; but if it’s false, it’s true. This is fuzzy loqic, that calls it half true and half false.

Yet we can start at the other end. Consciousness is the only thing we know or experience directly. When Descartes wanted to doubt everything except the immediately obvious, he asserted his own existence because of his thought. Consciousness is primary, the external world of objects is only derived. And this external world includes the brain as studied by science.

We could come to the diametrically opposed view to the one stated in the beginning: that the brain is a mere mechanism being used by the spirit to interact with matter. It provides a peephole (perception) and a slot for manipulation (as with a joystick) in motor-action.

Weird things happen along the four blades of the windmill of knowledge. Relativity and quantum mechanics all have their paradoxes. So why not psycho-physics? In some interpretations of quantum theory (e.g. The EPR experiment), time can move backwards.

I am not ready to assert anything. Maybe my brain dictates what I write, and is really making fun of me.