Everything we see, hear, smell, and touch is not the world as it exists in itself, but rather a translation created by our brains of electrical and light signals and neural impulses that have no meaning in themselves. The eye receives waves of light, the ear receives vibrations in the air, and the skin receives pressure and temperature — all of these are raw signals, containing neither color, sound, nor smell until the brain translates them into what we call “the world around us.”

We therefore do not live in the universe itself; we live in the image our brain has drawn of the universe.

And the question that deserves to be asked boldly is: Why do we trust this translation so completely and assume that it is absolute reality, when at its core it is simply an old agreement between the brain and certain instruments from which it has become accustomed to receiving signals?

A child prodigy named Patrick Flanagan, at the age of fourteen, conducted an experiment designed to make the skin “hear” instead of the ear, using a small device that converted sound into electrical signals transmitted through the skin to the auditory nerve. He obtained a U.S. patent for it in 1968.

It was not so much a miracle as a revelation: it is not the sense organ that creates sensation; the brain does. The sense organ is merely one of many possible gateways.

A Collective Illusion, Not a Shared Reality

Why, then, do we all — as human beings — agree that the sky is blue, that the sound of thunder is frightening, and that the smell of a rose is pleasant?

Because, at our biological core, we are made from the same basic material: essentially the same genes, the same general neural architecture, and the same receptors shaped by evolution over millions of years to serve a single creature called the human being.

Our translation of the world is therefore similar because the translator within us is fundamentally the same in its composition.

But similarity in the instrument of translation does not mean that what is being translated is reality itself.

What we believe to be an objective world shared among us is, in fact, a collective illusion — one we have agreed upon because our bodies are similar, not because we have perceived the universe exactly as it is.

In other words, we are distinct individuals, but we share the same illusion and therefore mistake it for reality.

When the Translators Differ: Genius, Art, and Mysticism

From this perspective, we can understand what we call genius differently.

A genius is not necessarily someone who sees more than we do, but someone whose translation of signals is constructed differently — someone who detects, within the same chaos, a pattern that no one else has noticed, or hears, within the same silence, a melody that no one else has heard.

Mozart did not possess another kind of ear, but his brain translated the same vibrations into a structure that the ears of his contemporaries could not perceive.

Van Gogh did not see a different sky from the one his neighbors saw in Arles, but his brain translated the same light into swirls of blue and gold that no one before him had seen. When we stand before his painting The Starry Night, we are not actually looking at the sky; we are looking at a brilliant translation of light that he alone perceived.

Confucius, Buddha, and the mystics, for their part, did not claim to possess a sixth sense when they spoke of seeing with the heart or hearing truth. Rather, they pointed — perhaps without precise knowledge of what they were describing — to the same idea: that the instruments of translation are capable of expansion.

When Ibn Arabi spoke of the eye with which a human being sees, he was not describing a new physical organ. He was describing a brain whose capacity for translation had expanded enough to perceive signals that others could not.

Genius, art, and mysticism, in essence, are not departures from the laws of perception, but rare mastery of them.

The World of the Bird, the Insect, and the Animal: The Same Universe, Another Illusion

If this slight difference between one human being and another is enough to produce a genius, a visionary, or even a prophet, what about the fundamental difference between a human being and another species?

The bee sees the world in ultraviolet colors that we cannot perceive at all.

The dog lives in a universe of smells whose richness we cannot imagine.

The bat perceives through echolocation rather than light.

The bird senses the Earth’s magnetic field as a map by which it navigates.

All these creatures live in the same physical universe that we do, under the same sun and upon the same earth. Yet they translate it into worlds completely different from ours because their instruments of translation are different from ours.

The universe is one, but the perceived worlds are as numerous as the species that perceive it — indeed, as numerous as the brains that translate it.

From the Whole to the Self

From the broader perspective, however, each one of us feels that he exists — that he thinks, feels, and perceives the world around him through his own self.

This sense of individual existence is what we call consciousness.

But the question that has puzzled philosophers and scientists for thousands of years is this: Where does this sense of individuality come from, despite our sharing the same collective illusion of consciousness of the world around us and of the universe?

Science says that consciousness is a product of the brain. It is the natural result of the activity of millions of neurons communicating with one another, and from this complex communication emerges our sense that we are “ourselves.”

In other words, there is nothing else; consciousness is the body thinking.

But this explanation encounters a problem that has puzzled even the greatest scientists: We can understand how the cells of the brain function, but no one can explain why this activity is accompanied by an inner experience of subjectivity.

The brain is simply a machine processing information in silence, without experiencing anything. This gap is known in philosophy as the “hard problem of consciousness,” and no one has yet managed to bridge it.

What Is the Self?

Before we move on to the spirit, there is an intermediate level that many overlook when they reduce the human being to the simple duality of body and spirit: the self, or nafs.

The nafs — in the non-biological constitution of the individual — is neither the spirit nor merely the activity of nerve cells.

It is a created entity, meaning that it exists within time: it is born with the human being, grows with him, and changes as his circumstances change. Indeed, it lives and dies just as the body lives and dies — unlike the spirit, which, in the religious conception, is a divine command not described as perishable in this sense.

And the self, unlike the brain whose general structure is similar among human beings, differs fundamentally from one individual to another.

There is, as the Qur’an describes it, the tranquil self, the self that commands to evil, and the self-reproaching soul that holds its owner accountable.

This difference is what gives each human being his own moral capacity, and his ability to expand and grow or contract and become narrow, according to what he nourishes within himself or allows to weaken.

Perhaps the most precise verse describing this reality is:

“Allah does not burden a soul beyond its capacity. It will have what it has earned, and it will bear what it has earned.”

(Qur’an, Al-Baqarah 2:286)

The verse recognizes that the nafs is an entity with a capacity that varies from one individual to another, that responsibility is conditioned by this capacity and does not exceed it, and that every self is responsible for its own deeds.

This is what gives each human being his individuality and conscience, and makes the nafs, rather than the spirit, the seat of the conscience that holds us accountable from within.

My question is: Does the nafs have a code, just as the body does? And if so, where is it?

If the body is the machine and consciousness is the effect of its operation, then the nafs is the unique moral entity that carries this consciousness and directs it, expanding or contracting according to what its owner plants within it.

As for the spirit, that is something entirely different.

The Spirit

Religion sees the spirit as preceding the body.

Religions teach that it is neither a product of the body nor a product of the nafs, but something that precedes them and is breathed into them.

In the Qur’an, the nature of the spirit is described as a divine matter beyond human understanding:

“Say: The spirit is from the command of my Lord.”

Based on this understanding, the consciousness we experience does not originate from the brain alone or from the nafs alone. Rather, it is an effect of the presence of the spirit within this body — like light that reveals the effect of electricity without itself being electricity.

So Where Does Consciousness Come From?

Here lies the real question:

Is consciousness something the brain produces from its own matter?

Or is it something carried by the nafs through its moral accounting?

Or is it something that passes through both from a deeper source — the spirit?

Some spiritual philosophies propose a fourth, intriguing possibility: that consciousness is neither a product of matter, nor of the individual self, nor even of the spirit alone, but is the fundamental reality from which everything emerges — and that each person’s spirit is merely a small spark of a greater consciousness encompassing the entire universe.

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The truth is that science alone cannot answer this question, because science can describe how the brain works, but it cannot explain why we experience our own subjectivity.

Nor can religion alone answer it, because religion tells us that there is a nafs and a spirit, but does not explain precisely how the two connect with the body.

The question therefore remains suspended, just as it has remained suspended among philosophers throughout history — from Plato to Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd.

Perhaps there is a hidden wisdom in the fact that this question remains without a final answer.

For the human being who continues to question himself is a human being who remains awake.

And perhaps this very wakefulness is the essence of the consciousness we are trying to understand.