h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is not a piece of objective science. These are my subjective, personal ideas. So you can take them, or leave them. This is the crux: there is not really a rigid division between external reality and the human mind, or the subjective, inner world of every person. In a way, the inner world might be even more "real" than the outer one. I think that external reality is only a manifestation of a thought-like substrate that underlies all of time and space, matter and energy. And I believe that the human consciousness rises directly out of this substrate, and interacts with it all the time. So, human (or any other kind of) consciousness and the material world are two manifestations of the same, mind-like thing. Modern people in general have been indoctrinated with a materialist dogma, which denies the mind-like aspects of reality. This has been a very grave mistake.

You all are familiar with the movie "The Matrix". This movie is merely a recent example of the speculations that have gone on for ages about whether the "real world" really exists "out there", or only in our own minds. For instance, when we dream, our dreamworlds seem real to us. This alone is enough to show that we can experience things as being "real" even though they are not real in the sense that the external world is. In fact, almost any world that we can imagine can be given "reality" by the mind.

Maybe it is the mind that makes the external world SEEM real, too. Phyisicists have always been able to extract mathematical equations to describe reality, but they have never been able to say what "breathes fire" into them - why is there a reality, which behaves according to those equations, and seems real? I mean, an equation by itself does nothing. Maybe it is consciousness that "breathes fire" into the equations. The world is real because we experience it as being real. And we can also experience other worlds, imaginary ones, as being real.

So why do we call those other worlds imaginary then? And where do the equations of the real world come from in the first place? And where do WE come from?

I won't go into the deepest speculations right now. But I hope this discussion so far has demonstrated to you that there is a very intimate interaction between the human consciousness, whatever that is, and external reality, whatever that is, going on all of the time. In fact, all of external reality, as we know it, is experienced by ourselves, INTERNALLY. So what is REALLY "out there"? We can never know! The only "external" reality we can ever know is the inner one! Unlike Neo, we cannot wake up into the "real" world and perceive that we have been living in an illusion. Because we cannot know that any "real" world into which we believe we have woken up is not also an illusion! We can only be aware of what is in our conscious minds; everyting else we are oblivious of.

So the difference between the external and the internal world turns out to be irrelevant. What we consider to be the "real world" is only the vast amount of internal data that we share with other people, that makes sense and that is consistent. Wait a minute - but if this is true, then those "other people" also have to be part of our internal world!

Yep.

It's OK if you want to go ga-ga now.

But this argument is by no means rock solid. Fact is, everything is much more complicated than this. Basically, there are dualisms. There are lots of people who are not you; there are things that are outside of your conscious awareness. There is a difference between mind and matter. But these differences are not themselves absolute. There is a level where they cease to matter. It's the same principle as the wave/particle in quantum mechanics. But if you get the "feel" for the deep issues underlying the problem of virtual reality, you can begin to understand that the mind's perception of things plays a big role, if not in the external universe itself, then at least in any kind of idea that we can ever have any chance of having about it.

Next time I want to talk a bit about supernatural/paranormal phenomena as it relates to the human mind, and also I want to mention some new scientific work (even if it may be a bit controversial) about the human mind and consciousness.

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