Nobody can see you scram in space

Blog number fifty-eight                                                          14 Nov 2006

My oldest son once found a photo on the 'net of an alien creature.  It had what looked like two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but that was all that looked even remotely human.  It was supposedly found dead somewhere in the desert.

A few months later I was watching America's Funniest Videos and there in living color was a video of a sting ray swimming up the side of a glass-walled aquarium, showing the rarely seen profile of the underside of the creature and there was our "alien."

I immediately called my middle son with the news that we had found out what the creature really was, but his reply was, "I don't think so."

I told him, "yes, it really was -- everything looked exactly like the photo."  He still refused to believe it.  I asked him why he thought I was mistaken and his reply was that he "didn't want to believe it."

I was impressed with his confession that he didn't much care what was real and what wasn't, preferring instead to believe what he chose to believe, but I was confused as to why anyone would prefer a made-up world instead of the real one.  He wanted it to be an alien so bad that he didn't care whether it was real or not.  I accepted that, since everyone lives in their own world anyhow, all the time.  I like my world to be as real as I can find it to be, but other minds, other worlds.  Who can say which is better?  I know I can't.

The real world is many times more amazing and "unreal" than any fictional one.  That's not my opinion.  That's a fact.  Fictional worlds are products of human minds and real human minds are products of what is beyond any real human mind's ability to imagine.  This is one case where the created cannot surpass the creator.

I am reminded of a quotation by Emerson Pugh, "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't." 

That statement by my son did do one thing for me, though.  It made me understand the inability for most humans to accept facts that do not correspond to what they believe.

They don't want to believe certain facts, ipso facto, they don't. Up to that time I laid that strange phenomena down to stupidity.  Fortunately or unfortunately, most people are not as honest as was my son with their explanations.

What unacceptable facts am I talking about?  I'll explain.

We see, not with our eyes, but with our brains.  We hear, feel, smell and taste not with any sense organ, but with our brain.  The whole cosmos then, the whole physical world, is contained solely and irrevocably inside our skulls.  You just can't get around that fact, no matter how much you hate it.  I don't make the rules, I just report them.

All the evidence points to the fact that there probably isn't anything out there at all.  It points to the fact that there probably isn't an "out there" out there.  The tree that you see in your front yard is not there, neither is the yard.  That tree, that yard, is in your head. 

The most that you can say about your senses is that they let you see a picture of what is "out there," like the truth that you can never see the object, you can only see the light reflected off it.

Haven't you sloughed off, ignored yet accepted, that solid objects are not solid at all?  That fact is accepted intellectually by almost everyone, yet almost none can accept that the solid object is not really there -- which is what that science fact is actually saying.  The fact doesn't correspond with what our senses tell us.  So it must not actually be real.  True, but not real.  Fancy tap-dancing.  Will you believe your senses or facts?

What are some of the ramifications of the physical world being contained inside our skulls?  Well, for one thing, when scientists study anything "out there," they are automatically looking in the wrong place for the answers.  Same goes for historians, economists and politicians. For another, any problem that anyone has is never because of anything other than that person's own consciousness. 

Yeah, I know.  That's not fair.  That guy scratched my car for no reason. 

I am not talking about the scratched car.  I am talking about your "take" on your scratched automobile.  How you react to it.  That's all in your head.  That's all fictionalized. There is no "scratched car."

Your emotions about your fictionalized scratched automobile, is real.  You are angry?  Real.  You are sad?  Again, real.

Why would a person choose to accept that our existence has already been purchased "as is" when all the evidence surrounding us says that instead of it being a junker that we have bought, we have instead been gifted with a beautiful, magical, miraculous, incomprehensibly opportunistic, supremely powerful vehicle? 

Why would a person, consciously or unconsciously, choose the mundane over the wondrous? 

Anyone?