Page 90 - Darwin's Dilemma: The Soul

Darwin’s Dilemma: The Soul

age forming in the brain even worse. A single location in the
brain presents us a world with countless distinct and flawless
details, and non-stop. This is the technical and scientific explana-
tion. Then, where is the “image”?
The Oxford University psychology writer Susan Blackmore
comments:

Crick* says that he wants to find the correlates of ‘the vivid picture
of the world we see in front of our eyes’ or what Damasio calls the
‘movie-in-the-brain.’ But if the visual world is a grand illusion, then
they will never be able to find what they are looking for because
neither the movie-in-the-brain nor the vivid picture exist in
the brain. They are both part of the illusion. 55

According to Blackmore, our feeling of direct
experience is simply an illusion. In fact, even the
concept of illusion fails to fully clarify the posi-
tion. An illusion is something that is detected
when we compare events occurring in our
minds with the physical reality.
However, here human beings do
not have direct experience of the
world outside—in other words,
of any physical realities. These
are all things produced by the
mind; and the mind can never
perceive external reality. These
are realities belonging to us
alone.

* The British biophysicist who won the
Nobel Prize for his co-discovery of the dou-
ble helix structure of the DNA molecule

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