Reply to comment

Our discussion in class this week about “reality” reminded me of one of my favorite passages from “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” by Tom Stoppard:

“A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of various kinds, or to be less extreme, a choice of persuasions to put it down to fancy; until "My God," says a second man, "I must be dreaming, I thought I saw a unicorn." At which point, a dimension is added that makes the experience as alarming as it will ever be. A third witness, you understand, adds no further dimension but only spreads it thinner, and a fourth thinner still, and the more witnesses there are the thinner it gets and the more reasonable it becomes until it is as thin as reality, the name we give to the common experience. "Look, look," recites the crowd. "A horse with an arrow in its forehead. It must have been mistaken for a deer."

This passage touches on one of the conclusions that we reached in class: that the things we tend to accept as “real” are those things that are constructed in the same way by everyone’s brains (ex: the wall).  I think that there is a parallel between the way our brain integrates the images of a thing that it receives from all of our various senses, and the way that we as a society define reality based on the way that large numbers of people see the world.  We know that it is possible for a person to have a sensory disorder that causes him or her to construct objects differently with different senses (ex: for someone that is visually impaired, a cube may feel like a small, solid object with well-defined edges, but look like a huge blurry blob of color).  So, it follows that it is also quite possible that some individuals construct realities that are quite different from what society has defined as normal.  Do we then tell these people that what they are experiencing (what their “I-function” is telling them) is wrong?  People who are blind or deaf are considered to be to an extent disabled, because their inability to see or hear is a disadvantage in our society.  However, some people would consider synesthesia to be a disorder as well, even though it can be helpful, and provide a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings. I think (and I know some people in our class agree) that we are too quick to assume that the way we perceive things is the “best” way, and also too quick to dismiss alternative perceptions as being flawed.  I look forward to continuing our discussion of reality and the I-function.