I said a few posts earlier that I'd explain the idea that the world is just a construct of our minds. It's not a bad theory, when you consider that everything we experience is just a translation of our senses. I've been really philisophical and speculatory lately, due in part to my finishing Talbot's The Holographic Universe. It's actually even gotten me a little depressed, or, perhaps, it's made me go a little crazy. I think I'm feeling good enough now that I can dig the blog entry I wrote out of my coat pocket to finally put in here.

The other day, I walked up the stairs to the Fine Arts building as I usually do, but a strange thing happened to me. I noticed a girl in a wheelchair to my left who, despite otherwise normal appearance, possessed no head. I was shocked, but after a few blinks, the head reappeared, once again blocking my view of the bicks behind it.

After a reality (which I will get to later) check, I recalled from my recent studies that both eyes have a blind spot where the optic nerve connects to the eye. Since there are no light receptors in these areas, one might wonder why the hell we don't just have two spots of blackness in our range of vision. Look at this website: (I originally drew my own test, but 50megs.com suck and won't let me link to it)

Blind Spot Test!

The colored test, in which you see color where your blind spot makes the black dot disappear, is your brain's fault. It doesn't really know what's there, but it makes up what it thinks is there. Everything you see is filtered through a couple different parts of your brain before it really gets to your visual cortex. The headless girl phenomenon I witnessed was, I hypothesize, a result of this blind spot and my brain's inability to "guess" the appearance of the girl's head. I was also incredibly tired, and the low blood sugar probably limited my brain's ability to work all that well. What makes it more interesting is that I could see through the head to a detailed wall of bricks past the girl's body.

Not only this, but the reliability of all the senses leads me to ask this: what is reality? If reality to us is what we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear, and even believe in, then what is the entire universe but a false construct of our mind, the unknown and the infinite cosmos translated by our brains into a masquerade of the tangible, of matter, space, and even time? Who's to say time isn't an illusion to keep reality to a level we can deal with? It's certainly a better explanation for the creation of the universe. The idea that a "big bang" happened or that God was just "always there" just doesn't do it for me, and shouldn't satisfy anyone, because the infinity of time is so incomprehensible. I can't accept a theory that doesn't eliminate that paradox for me.

Where did it all begin? Quit looking at electrons, big bangs, superstring theory and Jehovah. It's too linear. If Michael Talbot has taught me anything, it's that our model of the universe--of reality--is insufficient. We pathetically either try to explain it too rigidly or leave it up to our divine daddy, but both methods are just time/space/matter theories to appeal to the only thing we can truly understand, which is the physical, human ant farm we exist in today.