Page 164 - The Truth of the Life of This World

recorder. Politzer will hear the braking of the bus, feel its impact on his
body, see the sights of a broken arm and spreading blood, suffer the
aching fractures, experience entering the operation room, the hardness of

the plaster cast, and the feebleness of his healing arm.
Just like Politzer, every other person connected to that man's nerves would
experience the accident from beginning to end. If the man in the accident fell
into a coma, so would everyone. Moreover, if all the perceptions pertaining
to the car accident were recorded in some device, and repeatedly transmit-
ted to someone, the bus would knock this person down again and again.
But which one of these two buses hitting those people is real? To this
question, materialist philosophers have no consistent answer. The correct
answer is that all of them experience the car accident, in all its details, in
their own minds.
The same principle applies to our other examples. If the sensory nerves
of Engels, who felt the fullness in his stomach after eating a cake, were
connected to a second person's brain, that person would also feel full after
Engels finished the cake. If the nerves of materialist Johnson, who felt pain
in his foot after delivering a sound kick to a stone, were connected to a
second individual, that person too would feel himself kick the same stone
and feel the same pain.
So, which cake or stone is the real one? Again, materialist philosophy
falls short of giving a consistent answer. The correct, consistent answer is

that Engels and the second person have both eaten the cake and are sati-
ated in their minds; both Johnson and the second person have fully expe-
rienced kicking the stone - again, in their minds.
In our previous example, let's make an exchange: Connecting the nerves
of the man hit by the bus to Politzer's brain, and the nerves of Politzer, sit-
ting in his house, to brain of that accident victim. In this case, Politzer will
think that a bus has hit him, but the man actually hit by the bus will never
feel the impact and think that he is sitting in Politzer's house. The very same
logic can be applied to the examples involving the cake and the stone.
All this reveals how dogmatic materialism actually is. Its philosophy is
founded on the assumption that nothing exists except matter. The fact is,

162 The Secret Beyond Matter