The Hidden Presence Of Brain Activity

During ordinary experiences or focused introspection I directly experience my consciousness.  Something I find highly fascinating is that my experience of basic consciousness does not in any way reveal the neuron activity occurring in my brain.  Just as I cannot know about blood circulating through my arm simply from the experience of moving my arm around, I cannot know about specific brain activities from mental experiences alone.

When I turn my mind's attention toward itself, focusing on a memory,

an idea, or a present emotional state, I do not sense the presence of

bustling activity of the scores of neurons in my brain.

According to some estimates there are as many as approximately 100 billion neurons in my brain, and yet mental activities like thinking (in this case by thinking I mean activities like actively reasoning or imagining things), perceiving, or introspecting, do not yield any awareness of this!  Mental activity occurs without communicating anything of neuron behavior to the conscious self.  Introspection and logic, thus, cannot discover the presence of neurons on their own.

Consciousness is a very simple and yet enigmatic thing.  It is omnipresent in experience, but its very existence can only be correctly accounted for on certain worldviews!  The existence of consciousness is self-evident, meaning one has to be conscious to doubt or deny that one is conscious, yet the existence of neurons is very far from self-evident.

If neurons are active in or around the brain, one cannot know this simply by experiencing or reflecting on consciousness; one would have to use additional empirical means beyond introspection and logic isolated from scientific data.  This confirms, yet again, the distinction between mental and brain activity that one can discover through logic without any scientific inquiry.