Page 120 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

perceptions arising in the brain.
Is the original of this world anything like the details that
person is made to perceive? We cannot know. It is impossible for us
to obtain any knowledge regarding whether there really are a lot of
people around, or if the scent of flowers fills the air. What we are
shown is the form of the environment as we perceive. For us, the
external world is solely the world we are shown. If the electrical
signals forwarded to us by our sense organs were eliminated, then
our external world would disappear as well, even though there is
an actual world outside.
We can only know what is forwarded to, reaches and is shown
to us. That is the sum total of what goes on in our minds.
Gerard O’Brien describes the concept of the outside world
and that of our perceptions:

There is an issue about whether or not the world that we experience,
the world in some sense that is constructed in our heads, whether or
not it actually corresponds to the way the world actually is. Because
if you accept, as a number of theorists now do, that our experience
of the world is constructed by our brains, then there becomes a real
issue of the correspondence that exists between our experience of the
world and the way the world really is, independent of our experi-
ence. And if you think there might be large mismatches between our
experience of the world and the way the world really is, then it starts
to look as though our visual world, the world of our experience, is in
some sense an illusion. 66
That being the case, what is real for us?
What we refer to as “reality” indicates a world with a materi-
al existence outside the brain and the senses. People have a full be-
lief in the existence of that world, whether they happen to be ob-
serving it or not. They are certain that they are in their own bed-
room when they get up in the morning. They imagine that they

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