What Do You Know?
Imagine, if you will, that you are born without the ability to see, hear or speak. Perfectly normal in all other ways, you simple will never visually sense your environment or communicate using a spoken language. Born into a kind of darkened anechoic chamber, you can only smell, taste and feel your immediate physical surrounding as you move about them. You are, in effect, a worm with a big brain.
What do you dream? My dreams, at least as I remember them in an awakened state, tend to be colored with visual images and spoken conversations. Can your dreams be formed of smells, tastes and feelings without images or conversations?
What do you think? My conscience thoughts are always in the English language. I once had a professor born in Persia who first learned to communicate in the Farsi language before coming to the United States and learning English as a teenager. I asked him one day in what language he did arithmetic. Always Farsi he said because that was the language in which he learned that 2 times 3 is 6. The numbers 2, 3 and 6 meant nothing to him without a language association. Can you consciously think without a language?
What do you know? Without eyes to see or ears to hear from others, that the sky is filled with stars would be difficult to know with only the senses of smell and taste and feel. Likewise, it would be difficult to know that a blade of grass reflects all wavelengths of light except those that produce the color we know as green. Can you know only what you can devine from the physical senses?
What is real? Just because you cannot visually experience the stars or the color of grass, does that make them any less real than for those of us who have the necessary equipment to sense them? If a meteorite from somewhere out there in space were to collide with the earth and destroy it, would you not perish along with your fellowmen who could see the meteorite coming, sound the alarm, and yet be unable to do anything about it?
Indeed, I've now worked myself into a corner suggesting not only can a reality exist without us knowing about it, but also we can know there can be realities we don't know about!
This argument, of course, requires that there be one a universal set of realities for everyone and everything. And, some evidence suggests such. Newtonian mechanics works the same for everyone. For people. Dogs and cats, too. Cars, trains and airplanes. Rocks. Planets. All the same.
And, what of those things we don't know?
Ah! That's next.
What do you dream? My dreams, at least as I remember them in an awakened state, tend to be colored with visual images and spoken conversations. Can your dreams be formed of smells, tastes and feelings without images or conversations?
What do you think? My conscience thoughts are always in the English language. I once had a professor born in Persia who first learned to communicate in the Farsi language before coming to the United States and learning English as a teenager. I asked him one day in what language he did arithmetic. Always Farsi he said because that was the language in which he learned that 2 times 3 is 6. The numbers 2, 3 and 6 meant nothing to him without a language association. Can you consciously think without a language?
What do you know? Without eyes to see or ears to hear from others, that the sky is filled with stars would be difficult to know with only the senses of smell and taste and feel. Likewise, it would be difficult to know that a blade of grass reflects all wavelengths of light except those that produce the color we know as green. Can you know only what you can devine from the physical senses?
What is real? Just because you cannot visually experience the stars or the color of grass, does that make them any less real than for those of us who have the necessary equipment to sense them? If a meteorite from somewhere out there in space were to collide with the earth and destroy it, would you not perish along with your fellowmen who could see the meteorite coming, sound the alarm, and yet be unable to do anything about it?
Indeed, I've now worked myself into a corner suggesting not only can a reality exist without us knowing about it, but also we can know there can be realities we don't know about!
This argument, of course, requires that there be one a universal set of realities for everyone and everything. And, some evidence suggests such. Newtonian mechanics works the same for everyone. For people. Dogs and cats, too. Cars, trains and airplanes. Rocks. Planets. All the same.
And, what of those things we don't know?
Ah! That's next.
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