Imagine an opaque sealed container with a single input and a single output. You don’t know what it contains or what it is supposed to do. You can see what goes into it and what comes out, but that is all. Such a container is a “black box.” By definition, you are observing from outside the box. You want to understand what is going on inside it, by noting what goes in and what comes out. Here’s the twist, though: The brain responsible for “you” and for all your experience is sealed inside an opaque container, your skull. From an observer’s point of view, it is a black box. Your sensory interfaces with the world provide inputs to you as an organism. Your motor outputs provide input to the black box of your environment. While you are a black box to the world, the world is a black box to you.

Like for any black box, the best way to understand what makes you tick is to watch your inputs and outputs. An observer can note what seem to be actions you perform (including what you say) and also what seem to be stimuli to which you respond. However, identifying these clearly is a matter of interpretation. Observers from your own culture will make assumptions about your inputs and outputs, based on what you all have in common, which an observer from another galaxy might be reluctant to make.

Your brain cannot leave its skull to have a “direct” view of the world outside. The world thus has no intrinsic look to it. There is no “real” appearance of the world when no one is looking, and there are no appearances at all without someone’s eyes to see, from within some black box. In this regard, a scientific observer is in the same boat as their own brain inside their skull. The challenge is the same: poke the black box of the universe to see what happens, or poke the black box of the organism to see what happens. Naturally, the organism doing the poking is part of that universe, which complicates the picture.

Including yourself in the picture introduces a maddening circularity, like standing in a hall of mirrors, where you see endless reflections of reflections. You can only interpret the world outside your skull by means of processes within it. But those processes are part of the world outside. You want to know how your brain produces your experience. But the idea brain is part of the experience your brain is supposed to produce, while the idea experience is also part of your experience produced by the brain… and so on.

Of course, everything that can enter your consciousness is part of your experience, a private show unfolding inside your black box. It only seems otherwise when it figures in a story you tell. It can then seem to be an element of an inter-subjective reality, potentially a story science can tell. Science would like to explain your personal experience—your sensations, thoughts, and feelings—ultimately in terms of the movements of atoms and electrons. But atom and electron are concepts occurring within the experience they are invoked to explain. Science bites its own tail when it tries to explain mind in terms of matter, because both matter and mind are concepts in the mind, which is presumed to arise from matter.

While thinking of yourself as a black box may present a dilemma, it’s also an opportunity. You are uniquely positioned as both the inquirer and the object of inquiry. Questions like “why did I do that?” or “why am I feeling this right now?” invite a look from both perspectives. You can search your black box for reasons in your own internal logic. You can also wonder, what in the world’s black box caused this feeling or behavior?