> leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity
Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.
YES. To put it crassly, it's like your brain is The Matrix.
I was driving the other day, thinking about reaction times and had the actual tangible feeling that I was just behind 'reality' because we don't actually see, feel, hear reality we see, hear, feel the brain's interpretation of it, and so it's ever so slightly behind 'actual' (are there variations in processing speed? And how do the fringes of these variations affect one's ability to exist in society?).
We are all living a very recent, rolling memory. Operating system loaded into RAM.
We've clearly got inputs, outputs, and when working correctly, some signal processing going on in the middle.
But more like: the inputs, processing, and outputs have much more complicated relationships than this causal chain that you have described. Modern neuroscience and research into NCC have shown that the brain, obviously, is not so simple.