Page 70 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

68 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

The same principle applies to the cake and stone examples. If the
nerves of the sense organs of Engels, who felt the satiety and fullness of the
cake in his stomach after eating a cake, were connected to a second person's
brain in parallel, that person would also feel full when Engels ate the cake
and was satiated. If the nerves of Johnson, who felt pain in his foot when he
delivered a sound kick to a stone, were connected to a second person in par-
allel, that person would feel the same pain.
So, which cake or which stone is the real one? The materialist philosophy
again falls short of giving a consistent answer to this question. The correct and
consistent answer is this: both Engels and the second person have eaten the
cake in their minds and are satiated; both Johnson and the second person
have fully experienced the moment of striking the stone in their minds.
Let us make a change in the example we gave about Politzer: let us con-
nect the nerves of the man hit by the bus to Politzer's brain, and the nerves
of Politzer sitting in his house to that man's brain, who is hit by the bus. In
this case, Politzer will think that a bus has hit him, although sitting at home;
and the man actually hit by the bus will never feel the impact of the accident
and think that he is sitting in Politzer's house. The very same logic may be
applied to the cake and the stone examples.
As is evident, it is not possible for man to transcend his senses and
break free of them. In this respect, a man's soul can be subjected to all kinds
of representations, although it has no physical body and no material exis-
tence and lacks material weight. It is not possible for a person to realise this
because he assumes these three-dimensional images to be real and is
absolutely certain of their existence, because everybody depends on the per-
ceptions stemming from his sensory organs.
The famous British philosopher David Hume expresses his thoughts
on this fact:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time
without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the percep-
tion. 54