What is reality? What is real? Is it something that you touch? Something that you feel? Something that you know? Something that you remember? When I touch the handle to open the door, when I see my room as I walk in, when I feel my bed as I sit down, when I think about my day, when I remember the people I saw at school, is that real? Did it really happen?
I just saw Shutter Island which is a movie about an institution for mentally ill patients that is located on an island and about its inhabitants, and at one point you really start to wander what is reality and what is the delusion. I know that in an earlier post I talked about how our personality and our senses limit our perception of the world and our ability to think, but this movie actually made me realize that everything, EVERYTHING that you know, see, want, smell, believe and are willing to die for are basically fabrications of our brain. We ARE our brain. If our brain works correctly, then this screen in front of me actually exists. If not, well I'm just hallucinating.
But what is a hallucination? The phenomenon of seeing something that isn't there? But then again how do you know what is there and what is not? Because other people tell you? How do you know then that they are right? Is there such a thing as an objective reality or is the world just a conglomerate of socially accepted concepts? Take 1984 for example. If you can say that there is a Reality, somewhere out there, independent of us, then it is possible in extreme cases to have one sane person in a society full of insane and delusional individuals. So in that case, you can't count on others to tell you what exists and what does not, what has happened and what has not.
And if we really want to push things, then how do you know that the PEOPLE around you exist? For all I know, I could be making them all up and they are not here. They are just ghosts that only I can see and that populate the world that I have created for myself in my mind. But in that case, you might think, it is impossible to ever know anything for sure about, well, anything. Precisely! It's like a bacterium on a microscope slide trying to study itself. Our brain gives us the freedom to shape the world around us, to try to understand it, to try to make ourselves comfortable within it, but at the same time, it is our prison. We never realize just up to what point our brain is irreplaceable and how much we depend on it until we are faced with mental diseases (or have seen a movie like Shutter Island in my case. Memento is also a very good example of this).
And that brings about a very important and somewhat ironic point. In western societies and in Europe, we place an extremely high degree of importance on reason and the scientific method. But, as rigorous and as precise as the results coming from this methodology might be, their starting premise is an assumption that has never been proven and never will be, and which is that our brain's functions can be trusted to lead us to the truth. I know that this might sound nihilistic and relativistic to boot, but the truth is that we have no way of knowing whether that which we are experiencing is real or not. Some delusions (like the one from this movie) are so realistic that we have no way of telling the difference between illusion and reality. It's like The Matrix, but the program is our brain and the wiring within it decides what we will see, believe or act upon. Everything is just a chain reaction starting from the same stimulus, but depending on what reactions are actually happening and how they are interpreted, we can basically have an almost infinite number of variations of the same event. And I think that might be the reason why mental diseases are so frightening. Because they strip us of our last source of certainty and of control over our environment, and they leave us blind.
Have you ever had that dream where you are doing something and all of a sudden you become blind and you try to open your eyes as wide as possible, but you still can't see anything? Imagine being blind, but not being aware of it, and going through your daily life, bumping into things and hurting yourself, without knowing how or why this is happening. Wouldn't that be confusing? But if the world were so ugly and horrifying, wouldn't you rather choose to be blind and blissfully unaware?
"If you had a choice between living as a monster and dying as a good man, what would you choose?"
Edward Daniels - Shutter Island
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