Page 92 - The Evil Called Mockery

90 THE EVIL CALLED MOCKERY

The Example of A Shared Nervous System
Let us consider Politzer's car crash example: If the injured per-
son's nerves traveling from his five senses to his brain, were con-
nected in parallel to another person's—Politzer's, for instance—then
at the instant the bus hit that person, Politzer, sitting at his home at
that same time, would feel the impact too. Politzer would experi-
ence all the sensations experienced by the person undergoing the ac-
cident, just as the same song will issue from two different
loudspeakers connected to the same tape 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, experi-
ence 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 transmitted 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 an-
swer. The correct answer is that all of them experience the car acci-
dent, in all its details, in their own minds.
The same principle applies to our other examples. 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 stone is the real one? Again, materialist philosophy
falls short of giving a consistent answer. The correct, consistent an-