Some thoughts

Submitted by Michael S (United States), Feb 9, 2015 at 06:35

I , as a foreigner , fascinated by the new world in front of me and unable to read the clues that Americans know to look for in other Americans - just see a happy and friendly enough old guy who chats with what is to me an intriguing American accent - as he kindly gives me a lift along the road. You get the idea - I see a friendly guy, yet you know what he really seems like to you. Who is right and who is wrong?

You are wrong: Americans don't have accents. Everyone else does :-)

What always stops me in my tracks when I think about it is the fact that our brains are about 1.5kgs of lipid cells. There is no light inside our skulls - it is completely in the dark . And only an input of analog signals travelling in via the optic nerve. Yet our consciousness recreates a world in real-time 24/7/365, in full colour. And does that in conjunction with input from other senses - sound, smell, touch - to create that most incredibly overlooked experience - the Moment.

"The Moment" is greatly over-rated. It's like a frame in an old celluloid movie. The movie's more interesting than the cell. What you said about how what we think of as "reality" is really just impulses in our brains, yes -- that is interesting.

My area of expertise is in science, specifically chemistry. I spent several years out of the field, but still voraciously read about the elements, their properties and reactions, etc. There's only so much mileage one can get with this sort of thing, though. It's called "paper chemistry". One can theorize and write papers all one wants; but the only thing that gives meaning to paper chemistry, is practical experimentation; and that experimentation is completely dependent on the the condition of our senses. We can be using a very accurate spectrophotometer, for instance, or atomic force microscope; but if we can't see or otherwise discern the output, the equipment is useless.

The bottom line, is that all science is sensory; and we perceive that sensory input, visual and otherwise, as a magical sort of response to axons and neurons firing away in our heads. Just realizing that we have such axons and neurons, and having a good idea of how they function, has been quite an accomplishment of mankind. Even with this understanding, though, something very important is missing from the picture: Where are WE in the picture? Where is the bloke sitting there, perhaps in our heads, looking at this show of neurons firing and squirts and juices doing their stuff? We haven't explained that. So, then, what is the actual reality? Is it:

1. The light, etc. that our senses picked up?
2. The chemical and electrical processing of it in our brains?
3. The "little man" inside us, making sense of all this? or
4. something else.

Intuitivel, I would say that "reality" is the first item, the "objective world" the imagery is input from. If we investigate that reality not by sensual experience, but by what we understand of the laws of physics, we know that the world isn't anything like what we see. We see "solid objects", for instance -- at least, that's what we think in our minds that we are seeing. Yet we know that there is no such thing as a "solid object". That object is composed of atoms, and those atoms are subatomic particles and forces set in a matrix composed entirely of emptiess. Not only that, but those particles are simultaneously not particles but waves. This picture of the world we live in does not come from the world of physical, sensual experience (though it was derived from experience in that world); this picture of reality comes from the world of ideas.

Just as a nod to what you said, that world of ideas is like the difference in perceptions that you (an alien, obviously, having a strange accent :-) and I have of my hypothetical old neighbor. We perceive him differently not because of what we actually see, but because of ideas we have formed over time (in your case, a very short time) about him.

The world we think of as "reality", then, may or may not actually exist; and our perception of it is formed by our senses (and the neuro pathways connected to them) and by our ideas. Those ideas, by the way, are stored in our brains in the same fashion as the sensory input: in a language of sorts, that may consist of images. Most people see "idea" images without color. In fact, most people don't see them as images at all. Others, however, see them in 4-d plus color; I remember having my eyes closed during a time of worshipful singing, for instance, and seeing colored shapes changing their form in tandem with the music. Higher notes, for instance, produced more angular shapes; and the same notes produced the same shapes.

This, then, is how our brains seem to store information; and we've conducted tests of stimulating certain parts of the brain: Stimulating a particular location would conjure up a particular sensory experience. The one experiencing those stimuli, however, was not a brain or even a part of the brain: that one was the subject of the experiment -- not his body, not his brain, but what I would call the "little man" inside.

Who is that little man? That's a mystery: We can't discover this little man in the lab, because he has no physical existence that we know of. And when the brain dies, does the little man die? We don't actually have scientific evidence, one way or another. We have theories, but nothing we can point to. We may have discovered the "god particle" in the CERN reactor; but we know of no "me particle". We have heard testimony of this "me ____", which approximates to our spirits; and that testimony is that the "little man" does indeed continue after the brain has died.

What, then, is true reality? Is it the physical world, this void that is ever-so-sparsely inhabited with extremely small sub-atomic particles/waves/wavicles? Is it the world of ideas that describes it? Is it our brain? All of these things could conceivably vanish one day; but the "little man" lives forever; and as something eternal is infinitely greater than anything finite, that "little man" merits being called "reality". Is the rest illusion? We don't know. The Bible speaks of it as one day being "folded up, as a garment".

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