A gap exists in the explanation of contemporary biophysics. No account is provided for experience, how it is modified and characterized as sense, and the role that it may play in the formation and operation of biophysical structure. It is my purpose here to fill this gap.

This book presents a scientific explanation of “experience” in nature. It explains how dynamic sensing biophysical structures, like you and I, originate to become a part of the rich and complex evolving world.

Experience is that which is most familiar. It is common to all of our senses. Because it is so present, immediate, and constant we have developed a variety of ways of speaking about it. We often refer to our immediate experience as “consciousness” or “the mind”. Perhaps its basis is what people refer to when they speak of “the spirit” or “the soul.” Some suggest that it is distinct from the body, even that it may leave the body and survive death. Most of us will at least consider that our experience defines who we are: it is our existence, our “self.”

Yet we all will recognize that the form of our experience changes as our body changes, and we are reminded of this in sickness, trauma, and intoxication. But how are we to explain this relationship between our body and our experience, between our body and “our mind?” Does experience play a role in the determination of our physical behavior or is it merely along for the ride? How do we move from thought to action, what is the relationship between the two?

Surprisingly perhaps, for a work of science, we will suggest answers to these and other long standing questions. The more popular of these include: What does it mean to be alive? What happens to our experience when we die? How did all life begin?

Some less popular questions, but more useful perhaps, are: What is “thinking?” What role does experience have in the formation and operation of the body? How is a particular sense constructed and how does recognition combine these particulars to lead to directed behavior?

I will present the view that whatever the basis of experience is it necessarily plays a role in the world. It does play a role in the determination of our physical structure and its behavior. Indeed, I will present the argument that the basis of experience plays a fundamental role in the formation and action of the complex “living” world.

Our senses each possess a unique “character,” a differentiation of experience. Our sense of smell, of touch, our visual sense, and so on each have a form that distinguishes them. That form exists in the dynamic structure of our body. The body literally shapes how we feel.

Each of us, as a structure in the world replicated by the power of the genetics, is the product of this same mechanism in the large. We are an individuation against this basis, formed by these same mechanisms and evolved toward an ever richer characterization of sense.

This shaping of sense and the variety of behaviors associated with it are the subject of this book. I will explore how sense first comes to be in the world, the role that it plays in the formation and operation of individuals, the biophysical mechanisms that characterize our experience as sense, and how this mechanics operates in order to turn this “shaping” into what we refer to as “thinking.”

I take three approaches here to illustrate the merits of the proposal. I will highlight provocative new experimental results in biophysics that are suggestive and exclude certain other approaches, hopefully these exclusions will stimulate your intuition as they do mine. I will offer predictions that can verify or falsify the proposal. And I will propose the ultimate proof by proof in practice. If the proposal holds, there are new things that this understanding will enable us to do.

Obviously a successful proposal will inform medicine, providing new insights into sensory function and the treatment of dysfunction.

I will also explore how we may use this new understanding to inform our models of computation and enable us to create a new type of machine, a type of machine that can solve problems that we could not solve before, machines that experience.