It’s all so Matrix

Modern science tells us what the major religions and some philosophers have been telling us for millenia: nothing is real. Come to think of it, John Lennon told us that in Strawberry Fields too.

Matter doesn’t matter. There is nothing “solid” as such. What stops you being able to walk through a wall is not “substance” - there is no such thing - it is the strong nuclear force. The empty space within each atom is vast. If you imagnie a football pitch and place a pea on the centre circle, that would represent the nucleus. Now imagine the electrons whizzing around the outside of the stadium at the edge of the pitch in their “orbit”. I’m ignoring all the wave/particle duality stuff for now and treating you as if you know less about sub-atomic physics than me - which would mean you know less than bugger all. Unless you’re David Eastman in which case you have a degree in all this anyway.

So the atom is mostly empty space. And get this. The stuff that atoms are made of, well, that’s just bundles of energy too in strange configurations. Everything that we sense, has the nature of energy. Just energy of different types, of different frequency and amplitude. You and I are made of this energy. Our brains are “made” of this energy.

Now, perception and consciousnes. That’s the interesting bit. Everything that comes into our brains from the “outside” world, is energy. Energy in the form of various frequencies of light (which is just a part of the spectrum that our eyes are set up to detect, nothing special about that) hits the lens in our eye, forming an image on our retinas, upside down as everyone knows. The retina has specialised cells (rods and cones and shit) that in specialised groups, convert the energy into electric impulses which are shot down the optic nerve to the place at the back of the brain where they are interpreted as images. Interpretation is the key word. We don’t know how the brain “sees” anything at all. We don’t really know how this stream of electrical impulses is “seen” and by what. The other senses work according to a similar principle. Energy is converted into electrical impulses which are then fed to the brain which interprets the input.

Our sense are very limited. Everything is a representation. As quantum physics has shown in the 20th century, there is no subject/object duality. The act of observation itself alters reality. We can never observe reality objectively. Everything we see is a representation - an apparition. My sense of the world is all in my mind. The part of me that appreciates the senses - the sound of Jimi Hendrix, Picasso’s Guernica, the chilli sauce from Efes, the piercing feeling of my injection needle penetrating my flesh, the aroma of a Cohiba Robusto - all of this is in my mind. None of it has an objective existence, but I appreciate it all.

Some might say “Let me strike you in the groin with a mallet, then you can tell me that this is all representation and that nothing is real, that matter isn’t solid”. I would say “Fair point, but pain too, is perception, and pain too, is in the mind, as a representation, that is picked up by the consciousness and “felt” by the “soul”.

Some materialists argue that the “I” that experiences this is a pehnomenon of aggregated neural acivity from which consciousness spontaneously springs once an arbitrary limit has been reached. Bollocks. Whilst not wishing to underplay the incredible sophistication of the most miraculous creation in the universe, the human brain, I don’t buy the idea that consciousness is a factor of intelligence. I know a lot of people - and so do you - who have consciousness, but probably very little neural activity. I know bacteria who’d interest me more than some of the people I know. I believe in a soul. I can’t prove it. But the evidence is mounting.