On the “Galt’s Gulch”
discussion board for fans of the movie Atlas Shrugged, username Maphedus asked
an old question: “How do we know
whether our senses are being deceived or not?” The easy answer is the that the primacy of reality means
tautologically that reality is the primary experience: you know because you
know; it is irreducible.
On a different tack, I
would ask why the senses of bees, birds, and beavers are reliable for them, but
ours are specially cursed? Like
them all, we, too, evolved on Earth and adapted to its changing environments.
Our senses are in and of the world.
Moreover, we invent and construct transducers – telescopes, microscopes,
electroscopes, spectroscopes – that extend and enhance our senses. Would you
suggest that the rings of Saturn and the nucleus of a paramecium are not real?
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| The Outer Limits: "The Brain of Col. Barham" is housed in a vat. Nonetheless, he adapts. |
Mephesdus framed his
question in some detail: "How do we know what reality is? Through our
senses? If that's all it takes, then how do we know whether our senses are
being deceived or not? Doesn't the existence of hallucinogenic drugs prove that
our senses are not always reliable? What about optical illusions? And then
there are aspects of reality which are imperceptible to our senses – how do we
deal with that?" And further,
in our private discussion, he amplified his concerns: “There’s a philosophical
thought experiment called "Brain in a Vat" which I think is very
intriguing, and relates directly to the idea that our senses are supposedly
reliable. … A variation on the "Brain in a Vat" thought experiment is
presented in the sci-fi movie The Matrix,
where the entire world is really just a computer program. …
I also seem to recall an excerpt from Barbara Branden's biography of Ayn
Rand, titled The Passion of Ayn Rand,
in which Ayn Rand was in a hospital after surgery, heavily medicated, and a
street lamp outside was casting a shadow across the window, and Ayn Rand
thought it was a tree. When Barbara Branden corrected Ayn Rand, telling her
that it was a street lamp and not a tree, Ayn Rand became extremely irritated
at Barbara for daring to suggest that her senses could not always be trusted.”
As far as I know from
second-hand reports, hallucinogenic drugs do not alter perception to the point
of invention. No one has reported something that was
not “there” only that what they reported was distorted or otherwise processed into
something else. Teenage friends of
mine said that the front grills of automobiles looked like animals. They did not claim that animals seemed
to exist where no animals were found.
This supports the facts that we
evolved to perceive. While various roots, shoots, herbs, and berries variously
prepared can affectively change our mental processes, the facts of reality are not alterable. That is why they are reality, and not the products of
our (altered) consciousness.
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| Paramecium: real or artifact of misperception? |
The “Brain in a Vat”
paradox is another sophistry. We
could also ask: “How do we know that we are not really angels and rather than
just corporeal husks in which the consciousness of angels have been
entrapped?” In order to answer
either question, you would have to be “outside” the question, able to see the
vats, the Matrix, or the entrapped angels. Moreover, in the movies of the Matrix triology, very many
unresolved paradoxes would plague any inhabitant. Agents can take over any entity, as when Smith became a
helicopter pilot. Did the pilot
never go home to his wife? Will she and the kids and the air traffic
controllers and the commanding officer and their bunkmates all not wonder what
happened? We do not have such
problems with reality because reality is real.
“Ayn Rand on drugs” is
compelling to contemplate. In
truth, she was on Benzadrine. But certainly
in the hospital scene, the question was not the validity of her senses per se but of her mental processes. The shadows were whatever they were,
but it was her interpretation of
them that defined them. From Plato’s
Cave to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams,
the “stuff” is unarguable; what we make of it is highly debatable.
ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
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