An episode of a series about the brain that aired recently on PBS suggested that everything that a person regards as reality is essentially constructed within their own mind. Not in the sense that everybody creates their own unique world, but in the sense that all the colors we see and odors we smell and flavors a person tastes do not exist on the other side of the portals to our perception in the way we think they do. That a tree actually does grow in a garden outside a home is not subject to argument; it is the reality of each person’s perception of the colors of the leaves, the aroma of its bouquet and the flavor of its fruit comes under scrutiny.If it is true that leaves only become green through the process of electrical transmission from the eyes to the brain and that nobody anywhere at any time has ever seen what leaves actually look like—their Platonic form, if you will—then surely it is entirely possible that nobody working on this assignment can ever actually be 100% sure that they are doing homework out there in that world beyond the portals of perception whose reality is beyond argument. The fact is that there really is no way at all to prove that the act of their sitting at their computer and typing words into a program on a keyboard is not actually just the perceptual image of someone—or something—whose form is so totally beyond their comprehension that it would be roughly equivalent to trying to explain to Snoopy that he exists only in the mind of anyone watching him on TV or reading a Peanuts comic strip at any given time and even then only as a result of being created by a man who no longer exists himself anymore.
Weird stuff, but trying to argue that I am not just a construct of someone else’s perception is every bit as impossible to prove as arguing that I do exist here and now. Even turning in this assignment won’t prove that I actually wrote it.
Now there’s a real mind blower!