Page 882 - Atlas of Creation Volume 1

First, imagine that by artificial means, your brain can survive apart from your body. And suppose a com-
puter able to produce all kinds of electrical signals. Let us artificially produce electrical signals of the data re-
lating to a given environment—including its sights, sounds and aromas. Finally, let's have electrical 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 sit-
ting 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
availability of stimulations to the relevant centres. It is perfectly possible for these stimulations (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, produced, according to modern physics, by the proximity of the electrons and pro-
tons 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. 195

It's very easy indeed to be deceived into deeming perceptions without any material correlates as real.
Often we experience this illusion in dreams, wherein we experience events and see people, objects and set-
tings that seem completely genuine. But they're all merely perceptions. There's no basic difference between
these dreams and the "real world"; both sets of perceptions are experienced in the brain.

Who Is the Perceiver?

The "external world" that we think we inhabit is no doubt created inside our brain. Here, however, arises

a question of primary importance: If all the physical objects we know of are intrinsically perceptions, what
about our brain itself? Since our brain is a part of the material world just like our arms, our legs, or any other
object, it too should be a perception.

An example will help illustrate this point. Assume that we perceive a dream in our brain. In our dream,
we have an imaginary body, imaginary arms and eyes, and an imaginary brain. If, during our dream, we
were asked "Where do you see?" we'd answer, "I see in my brain." Yet, actually there is no real brain to talk
about, only an imaginary body, along with an imaginary head and an imaginary brain. The seer of the
dream's various images is not the imaginary dreaming brain, but a being who is far beyond it.

Since there is no physical distinction between the setting of a dream and the setting we call real life,
when in "real life" we are asked the same question of "Where do you see?" it would be equally meaningless
to answer, "In my brain." Under either condition, the entity that sees and perceives is not the brain, which is

after all only a hunk of nerve tissue.
So far, we have kept referring to how we watch a copy of the external world in our brains. An important
result is that we can never know the external world as it actually is.
A second, no less important fact is that the "self" in our brains who observes this world cannot be the
brain itself, which is like an integrated computer system: It processes data reaching it, translates it into im-

ages, and projects them on a screen. Yet a computer cannot watch itself; nor is it aware of its own existence.
When the brain is dissected to search for this awareness, nothing is found in it but lipid and protein mol-
ecules, which exist in other organs of the body as well. This means that within the tissue we call "our brain,"

there is nothing to observe and interpret the images, constitute consciousness, or to create the being we call
"ourselves."
In relation to the perception of images in the brain, perceptual scientist R.L. Gregory refers to a mistake
people make:

There is a temptation, which must be avoided, to say that the eyes produce pictures in the brain. A picture in the
brain suggests the need of some kind of internal eye to see it—but this would need a further eye to see its pic-

880 Atlas of Creation