Every Brain Plays Its Own World

All knowledge, all experience could be said to be a neural situation inside the skull, and the brain is not merely a receiver and recorder of input through the senses: it also has output because the way in which it structures its senses and nerve patterns shapes the input in the same way that a harpist, by selective plucking, brings formal melody out of a row of uniformly scaled and otherwise silent strings. Thus the brain evokes the sensible world by sounding the strings of all those vibrations which we call the real, external world. Every brain plays its own world, but all brains of similar structure are playing similar worlds, and a brain of different structure would make a different selection of vibrations and so evoke from them a world quite different from ours.