The Strange Timing of Consciousness

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]So there's something up, down, backwards about the timing of consciousness. And this should have been a major issue in the 60s when the medical model was taking over. And the medical model is this consequence of materialism. It's that our meatsuits particularly our brain is responsible for all mental states. uh all pathologies, illnesses. Uh it was the creator of the phrase mental illness that the mind can be ill in the same way that the brain is ill because all mental activities are caused by the brain. And so the timing of consciousness should have been something everyone discussed. It should have been one of the main problems for materialism, but it just got swept under the carpet. very few people only talk about one who even discussed it. And even there's something strange about his version. And so this could go back as long as we've been thinking about the material world because if our brains give rise to consciousness and consciousness is a mental event that it should take time. All mental events they're fast. They're in the range of milliseconds. So two 300 milliseconds can be a response. So they are fast but they still take time. There's no such thing uh in the world of neuroscience as an instantaneous event. So the problem with that is even though they take time, they don't seem to take time. So if someone taps the back of your hand, you touch a table, the world that you're looking at and experiencing in a sensory way all seems to happen instantly.

[00:01:42]But that can't be possible. It should appear that something happens in the world and then a fraction of a second behind that event then we become conscious of it. But that's not at all the way our experience tells us it is.

[00:01:59]So this is a real problem. And I mentioned Benjamin Leette and he had a very interesting situation where he had patients they were going to undergo brain surgery. So the air had hit their brain and he had access to their sensory cortex. Now that's very important because the sensory cortex is where it all happens according to neuroscience.

[00:02:20]You know it's not that my hand is out here. Uh what I'm really experiencing is the brain conjures up the experience of the hand in the sensory cortex. So you can stimulate it directly and it'll feel like someone's stimulating your hand.

[00:02:35]And in fact, the sensory cortex has a whole map of the body. And I've talked about this in other videos. Larger areas um correspond to body parts that are more u useful. In other words, the hands have a big part of the sensory cortex.

[00:02:52]The lips have a very big part of the sensory cortex because uh speech and u uh building things and making things are very important for humans. Anyway, the point is is that we're not feeling the world out here in our external limbs. We're feeling it up in the sensory cortex. Now, he had access to direct stimulation of the sensory cortex. So, what this gave him the opportunity to do was to look at the timing of consciousness. So, he could stimulate the direct sensory cortex and it see where it corresponded.

[00:03:28]So, maybe the person felt it in their right hand. Now he could compare this to if he touched the patient's left hand and he could touch them both at the same time and say well which came first. Now the reason this is so interesting is because if you touch the left hand it has to go through all the sensory nerves the spinal cord the um base of the brain through the phalamus and then it goes on eventually to the sensory cortex and of course all that takes some time. So the hypothesis was initially well of course the direct brain stimulation should come first but that's not what he found. So if he touched uh the sensory cortex corresponding to the right hand and the left hand uh the left hand actually was sensed first. In fact he had to give an entire half a second head start to the sensory cortex for them to be felt at the same time. So his story and it's true that neuroscientists have talked and discussed this because it's such an such a strange anomaly and his conclusion is that uh when this event goes through our sensory systems and goes through the phalamus and eventually ends up in the sensory cortex perhaps in the phalamus it gets backdated. So it says well this happened half a second ago. In other words, it takes half a second for consciousness to be conjured up in the brain, but it has a backdating property that says, "Oh, well, this happened half a second ago." So, that's the trick that keeps consciousness in time with the real world. And when he gave the direct brain stimulation, it didn't go through the phalamus. It never got this backdating. So, it was more uh what you might say natural. And so it actually did take half a second for consciousness to create or for the brain to conjure up a conscious uh event. And so uh there are a couple strange things with this and people neuroscientists few of us have been talking about this for since the 60s. Not me, but you know, some of us. And uh the interesting thing is that uh not it people buy into it because it's kind of cool to think that we're always living half a second behind the world, but it doesn't feel like that because we get this backdated um illusion that we're in time with the real world. But some of that just doesn't really work out if we consider evolution. Because to buy into the material world is at least somewhat to buy into evolution. That life slowly evolved over millions and millions of years and got more complex because of uh random mutations and uh selection and survival and all that.

[00:06:17]And that's where it gets a little strange because think of what if all conscious beings were a half a second behind the real world. Would that even really matter? And if we were all behind, who would even notice it? And um I mean how would we really be able consciousness is the only way we um are able to experience the world. So without Leette's kind of strange surgery intervention where he was able to do experiments like this, no one would even know the timing was off. Which begs the question, why would evolution go through all this trouble to create um anthalamus is one of the parts of the brain that it's it's like a relay station. when we used to teach in um introductory psychology because all the senses except for smell but all the senses go through it and then it relays it to the higher brain areas like the sensory cortex. So why do this amazing trick of the phalamus in the first place? Um maybe the whole thing is off you know without lab we we don't have any other explanation.

[00:07:19]In other words, the materialist account should suffer the consequences of a massive question that has gone unexplained. If consciousness is the product of the brain, all these processing events take time. So, how is it that consciousness doesn't take time if it should? And again, maybe Leette uh you know, he can't explain like why evolution would engage in this massive illusion to begin with when again if we were all suffering from the same no one would even notice it. And it also involves again a random gene mutation that you know the phalamus just through genetic randomness would somehow have to have this backdating just happen to occur and then through survival advantages now we're the end product of um this evolution. So that there's quite a bit of baggage to buy and that's what I've been getting at with these videos.

[00:08:14]There's a lot of baggage with the materialistic explanation and maybe we have it completely backwards. Maybe the consciousness is giving rise to what we call the material world. And that has something to do with this backwards timing.