Page 655 - Atlas of Creation Volume 4

Harun Yahya

cious entity that feels or perceives them is something else. The brain and electrical signals themselves
cannot enjoy the taste of food or the color and smell of a flower. Materialist scientists fail to realize that
it is the soul—as distinct from the brain—that perceives and evaluates.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz describes how perceptions arise independently of the brain:

Every conscious state has a certain feel to it, and possibly a unique one: when you bite into a hamburger, it
feels different from the experience of chewing a steak. And any taste sensation feels different from the sound
of a Chopin étude, or the sight of a lightning storm . . . Identifying the locus where red is generated, in the vi-
sual cortex, is a far cry from explaining our sense of redness, or why seeing red feels different from tasting fet-
tuccine Alfredo or hearing “Für Elise”—especially since all these experiences reflect neuronal firings in one or

another sensory cortex. Not even the most detailed fMRI gives us more than the physical basis of perception
or awareness; it doesn’t come close to explaining what it feels like from the inside. It doesn’t explain the first-
person feeling of red. How do we know that it is the same for different people? And why would studying bra-

in mechanisms, even down to the molecular level, ever provide an answer to those questions? 45
Peter Russell has described the problem in these terms:

Every time we try to pin down the physical aspect we come away empty-handed. Every idea we have had
of the physical has proven to be wrong, and the notion of materiality seems to be evaporating before our
eyes. But our belief in the material world is so deeply engrained—and so powerfully reinforced by our ex-
perience—that we cling to our assumption that there must be some physical essence. Like the medieval as-

Adnan Oktar 653