The other day, I was reading this book about perception (for my course), and it had the ideas of a philosopher to whom I will give credit to, as soon as I find the book again. Anyway, this guy was posing the theory that each of us is just as likely to perceive the same colours (etc.) as each other, as we were to perceive things as entirely different. Take for example the colour blue. It may seem obvious to you that everybody experiences the same thing when they see the colour blue. However, what if my experience of blue perceptually, could be equated to your experience of the taste of bananas. Assuming this is true, I would have labelled that experience as blue from the very beginning, and wouldn't know that there was a difference.
He goes further to say that because perceptions can be nuerologically induced by electrically stimulating specific locations on our cortex, that all of our day to day experiences could just be the product of a neuro-surgeon at work, while we are sedated.
While this is highly unlikely in that perceptions are enormously complex, and it would involve an abunadance of research to find the exact perceptual-neurological codes to produce desired perceptions, it got me thinking (dangerous thing)...
What if rich people had done a whole stack of research, and had found a way to perfom such feats of wonder upon the lower classes, for a releatively cheap price...They hire a whole bunch of brain surgeons/analyists to do their evil biddings, and create an entire fantasy world - what we would consider reality. The brain is very powerful and very much capable of living up to complex delusions. We could be sitting here completely obsessed with doing the things we consider normal in our lives: while our bodies work away in factories or something equally sinister. And then...we just die. They switch the machine off, and we would never know the truth.
It's a convenient little idea really. I
mean, the real world could be a paradise. Maybe the rich people are not the ones who do the brain stimulating. What if we were all infants.... we are born, they strap on this brain device, we start to fantasise and live out an entire lifetime in just a week (I am assuming that technology is beyond our limited scope). Then they introduce us to the REAL world, and we are completely ready for it!
Yeah! This explains all those near death experiences where people get told 'You are not ready yet, go back from the light!' Maybe their machines are switched off for a brief second because the doctors (who have put the brain thing-a-mi-jig on us) just made a mistake, thinking that our fantasy was over. But then again...we will never know..or will we? :)
