First published: January 7, 2023
Last revised: April 16, 2025

The world external to the brain couples with the brain through ElectroMagnetic interactions. Some of the effects result in a somewhat permanent modification of the brain like memory, learning, etc... Others are only transitory and they eventually dissipate as heat. While all this happens, a mind experiences the qualia produced as a consequence of the EM interactions. This has two implications.

The first is that there must be a point in the causal chain of events starting from the detection of physical phenomena by our sensory organs and ending with the dissipation of their effects, where qualia get instantiated. Somewhere "in the middle" some physical process gives rise to our subjective feeling.

The second is that the phenomena that a mind experiences are not properties of the real world, but consequences of what's out there that are only experienced subjectively. Reality is a frenzy of particles and fields scattering and interacting, and nothing is "coloured" or "smelly" or "noisy". Those attributes are part of the story created by the brain, our interface into reality.

So the tree in the forest that falls really does not make a sound if nobody is there to hear it, if by sound we mean the qualia produced by a brain, the experience of the variations in air pressure. If no conscious being is present on the scene, that's all that there is.