Malum

"What big ears you have!"

"The better to hear you with my dear!"

These familiar lines resonate with thoughts of childhood. It would seem though that these lines and the ones to follow pose a philosophical question that spans far beyond a whimsicle fairy tale. We as people take for granted the senses we use to interpret our everyday lives. However what we take for granted is also what we misunderstand. Unfortunately for the common conception, our sensations and perceptions have only a small part in the anatomy we attribute them to.

What do I mean?

To digress, the famous philosopher (and potentially my favourite) Immanuel Kant pondered about many facets of philosophical practice. One of which led me on my career path to date; epistemology. How is it that the human vessel can interpret the world around them, and what does a supposed world around them mean? It's the earliest of psychologies!

Mr. Kant proposed two worlds. The first was the noumenal and the second was the phenomenal. The former was a world unto its own devoid of human understanding whereas the latter was what we perceived of the world. The distinction between the two is drawn according to our limitations of perception. We can only see the world with the hardware we were given, which is a very different hardware than any other being or organism. Under this pretense it is impossible for us to truly understand the universe as it is.

Some time has passed since this notion was discussed and scientific and technological progress has allowed us to investigate this conundrum. Take your eyes for instance. Everything we see has to pass through the eyes before we can acknowledge seeing it and so naturally we attribute our sense of sight to them. However once the light hits the retina at the back of your eye, any light patterns that imprinted themselves into your eye have been transcribed into electrical pulses that travel to your brain. This happens on the order of just a few milliseconds and then the image is lost from your eye forever.

But where did the image go? There is a very complex network of systems that lead from your eye to the back of your brain. Evolution has teamed the head with thousands upon thousands of networks that lead visual information from the eyes into the brain. Once in the brain, vision is so prominent that it occupies an entire lobe (of which there are only 4, the occipital is the only one solely devoted to a single sense; vision).

The electric pulses in these neurons can't hold that image for you as you've seen it, and there is no light inside that skull of yours to project a film of what you just saw so that your brain can process it. Instead all that information is encoded into networks of pulses, where the pattern and rate of electrical firing allows you to see whatever it is your eyes were able to capture. Lesioning the occipital lobe will cause permanent blindness and render the eyes useless, and many studies have verified the brains role in sensory perception in multiple areas of the brain.

So what does this mean?

It appears Mr Kant was correct. But more importantly, the way in which he was correct is exciting, or perhaps to some, frightening. The only way organisms are able to understand anything about the world they live in, is by holding information in series of electrical pulse. In essence, any colour, object, sound, feeling, taste or smell is merely a group of little organic wires firing electricity to each other, each one doing so without having ever been exposed to the stimulus, locked away in a black skull. Scientists have become so good at understanding these networks that they can manipulate them at will by administering electrodes into the brain, or stimulating the brain with magnetic waves (a technology I had the privalege to use).

So where does that leave us? Essentially it means if there are neuroscientists that exist in some reality that understand these networks 100%, they could put people into a dream world where everything was as real as you feel it now. Figuring out the system would be an impossibility. It would not be The Truman Show, it would be The Matrix, where you are content knowing you live in a reality you are 100% sure is authentic despite the fact it isn't.

Whether this is true or not is, like previously stated, impossible to tell. But even still, it deserves some thought. Everything you have ever known in the world, everything you experience, everything you remember, everything you feel is a result of an electricians nightmare, firing electrical signals in complete darkness, governing your live.

At least you don't have to pay utilities.


Terms
Occipital lobe- 1 of 4 brain lobes located at the back of your head
Neurons - Little cells that make up the nervous system and brain matter. They transmit electrical signals that carry information.