Page 254 - For Men of Understanding

cal cables connect this computer to your brain's sensory centres and transmit
the recorded signals. Perceiving these signals, your brain (in other words,
"you") will see and experience the environment they represent.
This computer can also send to your brain electrical signals related to your
own image. For example, if we send the electrical correlates of all senses such
as hearing, sight and touch that you experience while sitting at a desk, you will
assume that you're a businessman in his office. This imaginary world will
endure as long as the computer keeps sending stimuli. Never will it become
possible for you to understand that you consist of nothing but your brain. This
is because all that's needed to form a world within your brain is the availabil-
ity of stimulations to the relevant centres. It is perfectly possible for these stim-

ulations (and hence, perceptions) to originate from some artificial source.
Along these lines, the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote:
As to the sense of touch when we press the table with our fingers, that is
an electric disturbance on the electrons and protons of our fingertips, pro-
duced, according to modern physics, by the proximity of the electrons and
protons in the table. If the same disturbance in our finger-tips arose in any
other way, we should have the sensations, in spite of there being no table. 6
It's very easy indeed to be deceived into deeming perceptions without any
material correlates as real. Often we experience this illusion in dreams, where-
in we experience events and see people, objects and settings that seem com-

Because of artificial stimuli, a
physical world as true and
realistic as the real one could
be formed in our brains
without the existence of a
corresponding physical
reality. Because of artificial
stimuli, a person could
imagine that he is flying an
airplane, while he is actually
sitting at home.

252 For Men of Understanding