Reality In Review: Part Two

Your Reality Starts With...

*Basic Premise 1: 100% of EVERYTHING you've ever experienced, are experiencing, or ever will experience was ONLY experienced (or will be experienced) in the space between your ears (i.e. - in your brain). Your brain defines YOU; your essence, psyche, personality, memories, knowledge, etc. Your reality is 100% inside / internal to your brain and your brain, hence your version of reality, is 100% unique to you. That’s because your brain is hardwired (but malleable with changes resulting over time) with billions of connections which are not duplicated even in identical twins. The odds of any two people having identical neuro-chemistry and neurological hardwiring are trillions to one against.

*I sense, I perceive, I process, I think, therefore I have mental states. This cannot be refuted since that act in and of itself would require you to have a mental state. Now whether or not that mental state is under the control of an outside entity is another question. For example, the external stimulating of various parts of your brain can result in you performing involuntary actions.

*Presumably, from the moment of your conception, throughout your time in the womb, hence your birth reality through and including your very early years, you experienced a reality – but you have no recall of what that reality was or how it unfolded. So somehow your actual reality is linked to memory / knowledge. Even as you are subjected to “Now”, by the time “Now” is perceived, transmitted and processed within your brain what that was is no longer “Now” but the past.

*Outside agencies apart, the brain, your brain, can be fooled. Your brain can lie to you! You’d be aware that there are various optical, auditory and tactile illusions that can fool you (i.e. – fool your brain). Mirages are pretty common. If you are color-blind then your reality is going to differ from someone who is not color-blind. There are numerous physiological / psychological reasons why your brain can lie to you, from just the ageing process to brain tumors to taking various drugs (legal and illegal). If sleep is an illusion (see below) then the brain - in other words “You” - can be fooled into thinking that you can and do sleep.

*There are also lots of bits and pieces part and parcel to what we term Mother Nature’s reality that you are totally unaware of. Your sensory apparatus doesn’t detect things like neutrinos that pass through your body by the millions per second, to most parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. – radio waves), magnetic fields, and to very high and very low sound frequencies. Below a certain threshold you cannot hear sound, see light, ditto taste or smell or sense touch. Those thresholds tend to increase with age (i.e. – the older you get the more likely you’ll need a hearing aid and lose some of your sense of smell and taste). So the question arises, are there aspects to reality which are not only undetectable by our senses (and those of any other living creature) but to date not detected by any of our artificial and presumably sophisticated instrumentation? Many involved with the Paranormal would say “Yes”, but offer up no demonstrable, experimental or repeatable evidence. Yet anyway.

*Basic Premise 2: You are NOT a single organism but a colony of trillions of individual organisms (your body cells) that work together in relative harmony to produce the emergent property that is you. This is akin to how one water molecule isn't a cloud, but many water molecules collectively produce an emergent property we call a cloud (or fog, or wetness, etc.).