Information

Our brains need to navigate the world to find food, water, love… but they’re inconveniently locked inside our bodies.

Without our senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, sound), our brains would have no idea what was going on in the world outside.

Here’s a thought experiment:

Imagine you’re in a space ship in outer space. The ship is a hollow metal tube — no windows, no viewing screen, no computer, no instruments. Your job is to get yourself safely back to earth. What do you do?

Inside the ship you have no information — you could just as easily be in an amusement park on earth, as you could be orbiting around Neptune.

What would you do? You’d likely start behaving randomly — hoping that you’d learn something through trial and error that would help you get closer to earth, or even know where you are now. This random behavior would be incredibly inefficient and unlikely to get you back home.

The brain basically has this problem — it’s locked inside a space ship (your body) and needs information to be able to do anything beyond random action.

Solution: we’ve evolved “portals” to the outside world — our senses! Our senses allow us to collect information about the world.