Page 168 - Allah is Known through Reason

An example about dreams will illuminate the subject further. Let us
think that we see the dream within our brain in accordance with what has
been said so far. In the dream, we will have an imaginary body, an imag-
inary arm, an imaginary eye, and an imaginary brain. If during our dream,
we were asked, "where do you see?" we would answer "I see in my brain".
Yet, actually there is not any brain to talk about, but an imaginary head
and an imaginary brain. The seer of the images is not the imaginary brain
in the dream, but a "being" that is far "superior" to it.
We know that there is no physical distinction between the setting of a
dream and the setting we call real life. So when we are asked in the set-
ting we call real life the above question "where do you see", it would be
just as meaningless to answer "in my brain" as in the example above. In
both conditions, the entity that sees and perceives is not the brain, which
is after all only a hunk of meat.
When we analyse the brain, we see that there is nothing in it but lipid
and protein molecules, which also exist in other living organisms. This
means that within the piece of meat we call our "brain", there is nothing
to observe the images, to constitute consciousness, or to create the being
we call "myself".
R. L. Gregory refers to a mistake people make in relation to the per-
ception of images in the brain:
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-
ture… and so on, in an endless regress of eyes and pictures. This is
absurd. 32

This is the very point that puts materialists, who do not hold anything
but matter to be true, in a quandary: to whom belongs "the eye inside" that
sees, that perceives what it sees and reacts?
Karl Pribram also focused on this important question, about who the
perceiver is, in the world of science and philosophy:
Since the Greeks, philosophers have been thinking about "the ghost in the
machine", "the small man within the small man" etc. Where is "I", the per-
son who uses his brain? Who is it that realises the act of knowing? As

168 Allah is Known Through Reason