Page 80 - The Evil Called Mockery

78 THE EVIL CALLED MOCKERY

woken them up. As Allah reveals in the verse, the world around us
is like a dream and everybody will be woken up from this dream,
and will begin to see images of the afterlife, which is the real life.

Who Is the Perceiver?
We can never have direct experience of the "external world"
that many people think they inhabit. Here, however, arises a ques-
tion of primary importance: If we cannot reach the original of any
physical object we know of, 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, we can never reach its original either.
When the brain is dissected, nothing is found in it but lipid and
protein molecules, which exist in other organs of the body as well.
This means that within the tissue we call "our brain," there is noth-
ing to observe and interpret the images, constitute consciousness, or

to make 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 pro-
duce 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 picture… and so on in an endless regress of eyes and pic-
tures. This is absurd. 6
This problem puts materialists, who hold that nothing is real
except matter, in a quandary: Who is behind the eye that sees? What
perceives what it sees, and then reacts?
Renowned cognitive neuroscientist Karl Pribram focused on
this important question, relevant to the worlds of both science and

philosophy, about who the perceiver is: