Top Highlights

• But they had no theory of how brain activity might cause conscious experiences, no idea how to dispel the mystery.
• Our failure to envision a mechanism does not preclude one. Perhaps we’re not clever enough, and an experiment will teach us what we can’t surmise from an armchair. After all, we invest in experiments because they often repay us in surprise.
• His TED Talk entitled “Do we see reality as it is?” (2015) has been viewed over 2.5 million times.
• Democritus, around 400 BCE, famously claimed that our perceptions of hot, cold, sweet, bitter, and color are conventions, not reality.1 A few decades later, Plato likened our perceptions and conceptions to flickering shadows cast on the walls of a cave by an unseen reality.
• The purpose of a desktop interface is not to show you the “truth” of the computer—where “truth,” in this metaphor, refers to circuits, voltages, and layers of software. Rather, the purpose of an interface is to hide the “truth” and to show simple graphics that help you perform useful tasks such as crafting emails and editing photos.