I often wonder about the parts of the world we are oblivious to. We don’t see infrared light, we can’t see see the fast moving wings of an insect. We don’t sense an earthquake coming like some animals do. We can’t pick up ultrasound like dolphins. We don’t have a sense of direction using the magnetic field like butterflies and birds.

A cat is fast enough to avoid the strike of a snake, a dog’s smell is magnitudes more sensitive than ours. The greater wax moth has the best hearing of any known animal, able to detect ultrasonic frequencies up to around 300 kHz, far beyond what bats and other animals can hear.

We walk around perceiving the world with less than perfect senses. And even though we can use tools that can measure things we cannot detect on our own, even with the most sensitive tools, we don’t know where our consciousness comes from. We know that we have imperfect brains with imperfect senses only partially observing the world around us, but we don’t understand who we the observer really is.

Am I my own thoughts? When the voice in my head asks a question, who am I asking? When I change my mind, what exactly is happening in my physical body? Is my consciousness more aware of things my senses don’t pick up? Could it be?

I think of our consciousness as far more capable than our faulty human senses allow, but it is forced to observe the world through our eyes, through our faulty, inaccurate, and oblivious senses… which limits its power and potential. The great filters are our senses. They aren’t so much faulty as limited, and they ultimately limit us.