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kbonds's picture

Secret Worlds

   I think the brain is a wonderful thing. It takes all of this information our senses give us and makes it comprehendible. I'm sure I'll never fully understand how it does what it does and how it contains a person inside of it, but for now I don't really need to know.

   Speaking of not needing to know, I know most people in my class were getting frustrated talking about how there is no reality… again. At this point I see three views or ideas showing up in class that most people seem to identify with in terms of the reality vs. no reality thing. Some people never want to think about it again. The world is fine how it is, and they are tired of getting their mind effed every week or so. Some people (like me) have come to terms with the fact that there is no reality but your own that is inside your head, end of story. Some people firmly believe that the consensus of reality is in fact reality. I'm sure some people are in between or completely different, but these were the most vocal views I heard in class.

   Like I said, I identify with the "there is no reality but your own" stance. I'll explain why to the best of my abilities. This year I coined this phrase for myself: "You are the center of your own universe." It is based on our class discussions and a quote from The Sandman, which was made into an xkcd comic (http://xkcd.com/52/). The comic makes me think of the brain itself and all the connections it makes constantly, which could go on forever. So really, not only are you the center of your own universe, you also contain said universe. And every day we encounter different universes and make them part of our own, so by the end of our lives we have made thousands of universe-connections, and it ends up looking like the comic. 

   The way this connects to our reality discussion is that because I am the center of my own entire universe, there is no reality but my own. We may observe the same things, but no two people will look at one thing and have the exact same reaction to it. Our Brain Drains prove this. We are told to think about something we all read, that was the same, that was "reality", but we each wrote slightly different things about that reality. Think about the color blue. I guarantee we all have different shades pictured in our heads. This is what makes each reality different: not the things we observe, but the way our brains observe them.

   I'm not really sure this makes sense to anyone else but me, but it's a work in progress. It's just what I feel our brain does, and what I feel about reality.

 

 

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