Page 124 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

Scientific experiments have shown that if we take a person and
hook their brains up to certain PET scans or computer technology,
and ask them to look at a certain object, and they watch certain areas
of the brain light up. And then they’ve asked them to close their eyes
and now imagine that same object. And when they imagine that
same object, it produced the same areas of the brain to light up as if
they were actually visually looking at it. So it caused scientists to
back up and ask this question. So who sees then? Does the brain see?
Or do the eyes see? And what is reality? Is reality what we’re seeing
with our brain or is reality what we’re seeing with our eyes? And the
truth is that the brain does not know the difference between what it
sees in its environment and what it remembers. Because the same
specific neural nets are then firing. So then it asks the question: What

is reality? 69
In the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know?, J. Z. Knight
describes reality:
That we simply are has allowed this reality we call real, from the
power of intangibility to pull out of inertness, “action,” “chaos,” and
hold it into its form, and we call it matter. 70
Each of us lives in a world of perceptions that belongs to us
alone. Nobody can share the images in this world and nobody can
confirm them, yet we regard these images as reality. That being so,
is reality simply an illusion? Does it consist solely of what we are
made to experience? Do the body we regard as our own, and the
life we consider to be ours, exist solely as phantoms in our minds?
All these are indeed phantoms. We live in a phantom world
brought into being in our own brains. We imagine that we are look-
ing at the true world outside, but a whole new world actually ex-
ists in our brains, and it is impossible for us to step outside it.
The philosopher Geoff Haselhurst describes how science has
no explanation for the realism of the world that forms in the brain:

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