of goldfish and quantum physics

goldfish know how to interact with the world they live in; swimming, mating, excreting, gills continually sucking oxygen from water. but a goldfish would have no frame of reference to consider the world "outside" of the water; such a thing could not be comprehended by the goldfish, even if he were in possession of the mental faculties to ponder such unknowables. he cannot gather information from the other side; his fishly senses being adapted for things aquatic. the realm outside of the water would at best appear to be a two-dimensional plane, with no depth, at rest at the top of the waterworld. imagine then, the utter incomprehensibility, even for a goldfish of einsteinian intelligence, of the manifestation of a human hand reaching into the water to scoop out one of his comrades. the hand would suddenly "appear" into the world, and once seizing its target, steal away with it somewhere totally unknown. more subtle, the intruder and his prey would appear to vanish, from the perception of the fishes, but they would actually only be moving in a direction the fish can't percieve- namely "out." the outside world of air and men, of course, does exist; and has its own rules and physical properties different from the world of goldfishes. this concept can be "scaled up" as it were, to give us humans an abstract insight into the nature of movement in directions other than the three we are familiar with.

i read this example from michio kaku a few years ago and it has helped me grasp some of the delicate natures of our universe. i'm no expert or physicist by any means, but one thing that has always puzzled me (and countless others through the ages, much smarter than me) is the nature of consciousness. a recent struggle with a severe head cold gave me a peculiar idea, one that had never occurred to me. while i was suffering in congested pain, with my head hurting out of all proportion to its physical size, i was struck by a singular thought, that borrows from the goldfish analogy. suppose that consciousness is that part of our physical body that extends into another dimension; another direction that we can't percieve. consider the case of a fish that has been hooked. the pressures, the forces, the dynamics that affect that fish are much larger that he can comprehend. the animal, once free to move in his environment, now is connected by the line to a much larger mass- outside the water. in this way, he is influenced by the the physical properties of this other dimension: the waves rocking the boat, the vibrations through the line, drift from the wind. in such a way, maybe it is that we physically extend into another realm, one that our senses are unable to percieve normally. but because it is a real and physical world, with its own properties, it influences our path, perhaps greatly.