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maggie_simon's picture

Brain creates all? Brain is limited by our bodies?

I thought about the brain's role in constructing what we experience in two ways:

1)  The brain has constructed everything, including the illusion that there are other people with brains (it is a pretty egocentric idea: I am basically saying that everything that I think and experience is created in my brain and there is actually nothing else out there, I have even created the reality that there are other people and other things beyond me in my brain) and so people come to similar conclusions because my brain has created a reality in which that is so.  2)  People come to similar conclusions because they all live in the same world and that world is perceived through a body which is limited in its ability to perceive and experience its surroundings.  The brain can only process those experiences that the body can perceive, and since human bodies are limited in the same way, it makes sense that they would come to similar conclusions about their surroundings.  It is interesting to think about how an organism in a body that experiences the external world differently might perceive its world, for example an organism without eyes or an organism that can perceive UV light.  The world around us is very much colored by the mechanism we use to perceive it and there is quite possibly (I think definitely) more out there that we don’t even know exists because we can’t perceive it.  I mean if you look at theories in physics they often describe phenomena that we did not perceive directly, such as black holes or quarks, but which we eventually discovered simply because what we could perceive was behaving differently than how we expected it to, based on our experience of perception in other similar situations.  I guess this is an example as to how negative or unexpected results in an experiment give way to new thoughts and explorations.

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