Page 83 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Harun Yahya (Adnan Oktar)

that each of your eyes is seeing a different part of the picture, and
your brain is piercing it together into a unified whole. 48

These accounts provide a general description of how the eye
sees. The eyes represent the first stage in the formation of an image,
the original of which, in the world outside, we can never know. The
world existing outside us is replicated inside us in a very small area
in the brain, thanks to the light passing through our eyes and by
way of electrical signals. When we look around us, any images we
see, even if it is one of the boundless heavens, actually forms in this
tiny area of the brain. We can never know whether or not the orig-
inal of this boundless image actually corresponds to what we see.
Peter Russell sums up the position:
When I see a tree, it seems as if I am seeing the tree directly. But sci-
ence tells us something completely different is happening. Light en-
tering the eye triggers chemical reactions in the retina, [and] these
produce electro-chemical impulses which travel along nerve fibers
to the brain. The brain analyses the data it receives, and then creates
its own picture of what is out there. I then have the experience of see-
ing a tree. But what I am actually experiencing is not the tree itself,
only the image that appears in the mind. This is true of everything I
experience. Everything we know, perceive, and imagine, every color,
sound, sensation, every thought and every feeling, is a form appear-
ing in the mind. It is all an in-forming of consciousness. 49
All this leads to an important realization, that throughout our
lives we imagine that the world lies outside us. The fact is, howev-
er, that we actually perceive the world that we imagine to be exter-
nal to us in a small region inside the brain.
Since we cannot directly see the original of the world outside
us, and since everything is a perception arising in the brain, then
is it actually the eye that sees?

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