Commentary on Benjamin Libet’s Mind Time. The Temporal Factor in Consciousness

That we are beings who do not passively perceive the world as it is, as it presents itself to us, so to say, but who, on the contrary, actively take part in the construction of their own world (even though we are not always conscious of our active involvement), has been theorized and proved for a long time. The world does not enter our body directly as it is, without any elaboration of our own: the world is continuously elaborated and constructed by us. We see and know only some parts of the world, and of those parts we see and know only some characteristics. Moreover we see and know only some of the relationships that exist between those parts, and relate only some parts to each other and only in some specific ways. The world appears to us as it is because we perceive and experience it in that way, and could not perceive and experience it in a different way. The fact that we perceive and experience it in that way is due not only to the specificity and limitedness of our sense-organs, that is, to the fact that we are provided with only some sense-organs that allow us to directly perceive only some levels of reality. Neither is it due only to the fact that we live in a society of people, having its own customs and culture that unavoidably bias our way of perceiving and conceiving of the world. It is due also to the specificity of our nervous system and our brain: they elaborate every sensory experience in a specific way