Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead says that poets are wrong to wax lyrical about nature. Instead, they should congratulate themselves that their minds create all that they perceive as wonderful in the world around them. Nature itself lacks color, sound, and scent—it is merely inert matter devoid of inherent meaning. It is our minds that imbue it with significance.

Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey characterizes this process as the self-elevating sensory experiences to a performance: our minds function as a magical spectacle tailored for us. Our world of consciousness is a theater that serves as a commentary on reality so that we can evaluate it. The pain in your finger is excruciating; the sweet taste on your tongue is delightful; her angry expression is intimidating. What is created in your mind is what the stimuli reaching your body mean to you.

Consciousness constitutes a temporally coherent experience essential for action and planning. The emergence of a model of the world allows the body to control itself much more effectively, for example by allowing the self to direct attention to different parts of the perceived world. That world is a fiction, but it nevertheless gives rise to a successful control mechanism.

A prevalent notion likens consciousness to a stream of thoughts, often described as an inner voice. In this analogy, you have one thought at a time. As a counter-image, the poet T. S. Eliot writes that consciousness is like

… the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.

Eliot's analogy suggests that consciousness functions more like an orchestra than a single instrument. The various processes in the brain—and in the body—contribute different parallel voices to a dense web of tones that together form the music that constitutes consciousness. Your experiences arise from the interaction of all the parts. Your self does not create the sounds of thought and emotion, but it is the music itself.

When listening to an orchestra, you can focus on the sound of a single instrument. Similarly, you can focus on one of the voices in your consciousness. The instruments complement each other, but sometimes there is dissonance between them. The voice in you that wants to eat more of the delicious cake right now fights against the voice that thinks about your future health. Sometimes one voice wins, sometimes the other.