The Brain: Deceiving us since ever

Rene Descartes once said....

Well, you already know what he said.

If you don't, he said "Cogito Ergo Sum"("I think so I am"), the infamous line that has become somewhat of a pillar for the modern philosophy of subjective reality to stand on. Most of western philosophy still revolves around the subject of mind and matter, of whether or not this world IS in reality or if reality is something objective at all. The whole thought process sprouting from this very absurd (and still very rational) question, leads to quite a lot of strange stuff, but never produces any rational or conclusive verdict. You don't really get to a point where you are able to answer the question already asked. You just come up with even more questions that leave you knowing less than you already did. But that is how philosophy is. It is not about answering questions, its about asking them. The answering part should be left to science.

Fear not though, I am not going to write a whole bunch of philosophical stuff today. This was just a premise, a way for me to set things up for what is about to follow.

You see, one of the most important things that this iconic quote emphasizes upon, is that the world around us does not necessarily have to exist for us to see it.

Observations, of any sort, be they tactile, visual, auditory have to be made through an observational device. The observations, thus resulting from this process, are prone to the various errors that the said instrument might have and are limited only by the limits of the instrument itself. When you measure the length of an object by using a ruler for instance, the resulting observation, that is the length of the object thus found is subject to the errors that might be inherent in the ruler. These could be, for instance, minor mistakes in the positioning of the rulings, zero errors.... so on and so forth.

This means, that any observation, no matter how minor or how major, is always subject to errors, because a perfect instrument does not exist.

Moreover though, moving backwards a little, we should also consider the fact that the measurement of length being carried out using the ruler is also being subjected to the errors that might be present in another instrument. The fountainhead, from where all observation begins.

The brain.

It is very true, our brain is an instrument. An instrument we have been using for millennia to figure out the world around us. And just as any other instrument, our brain too is prone to certain errors. It too has a least count. It too is limited in the extent in which it can comprehend the universe.

Going back to "Cogito Ergo Sum", we can see that Descartes was clearly skeptical about the world around him, and why shouldn't he be. His skepticism is in every possible way justifiable. Because the only way that we can comprehend the world is through our brain, then could it not be true that the world is simply a construct of our brain too? A figment of our imagination? A perpetual illusion we have been forced to see?

Coming to the conclusion that the world around us and every article inside it, whether tangible or non-tangible cannot be sure to be existent, Descartes thus propounds that the core meaning of life lies in the mind (that sounds oddly spiritual so I'm gonna rephrase that). He believes that the only way that you can be sure you exist, is if you can think. For no matter what there may be that is apparent around you, the only thing that you can be sure exists, is the mind itself, because if youre seeing all this, there has to be something that is helping you see it. Voila! The mind!

As intriguing as this concept  may seem to you, there isn't any way in which we can prove or disprove whether reality is subjective or objective because, well, all of this falls in the domain of philosophy.

But there are some things about the mind that we are quite sure of. That is makes compromises . That it creates illusions, that we are sure of.

How?

Look around you. The universe that you see, that I see, that we all see, why do we see it the way that we do? Because for us, the universe is simply the combination of the various types of feedback that our mind gives to different stimuli from the environment. We see because when exposed to light, the retina fires electrochemical signals to the visual cortex of the brain, thus giving rise to feedback in the form of vision. We smell because the olfactory areas are stimulated inside the brain, when the nerve cells in the nose are exposed to different types of chemical stimuli. The tactile sense, the sense of taste and the sense of sound, everything, stems from the feedback that the mind gives to a particular stimulus.

Now, you might have noticed I mentioned the brain makes compromises with the world around it. How is that? Well.... however you want to look at it. Our ability to quote o quote "sense" things, is nothing more than a coping mechanism created by the brain, for the ease of our survival in this chaotic world.

Look at it this way. Each on of our senses, or their subjective impressions, may be clear to us.... but they doesn't really exist. They are all compromises, illusions.

To be able to visualize things, is nothing more than to be able to respond to different electromagnetic waves in the visual spectrum in different ways. There is no such "thing" as "seeing". What we call "colors" don't, in fact, exist.

Let me give you an example to prove my point. Imagine a blind guy comes up to you and asks you what color the shirt you're wearing is. In my case, it is green. I will tell him, honest as I am, that it is green. The blind guy, being curious, asks what green really looks like.

What do you tell him?

You're gonna say it is the color of grass, or leaves, you'll only be able to give examples of things that are green, but will never, in your life be able to explain what this "green" actually is. Because, in all seriousness, this "green" you and I talk about does not really exist. It is simply a compromise we have made with the response that our brain shows us, every time we look at an object that reflects a certain range of wavelengths, in our case, that response being the color green.

In fact, using this concept, you can actually come with the solid argument that the green that I see may not be the same as the one you do.

This might seem absurd at first. But it is actually a very valid point. There is consistency in our observations, true , because when I see a leaf, I say it is green and so do you. But our concept of colors is actually established way earlier in our lives through different charts, when objects of different colors are shown to us. Now when a child looks at one of the objects on this chart his/her brain elicits a response to the EM waves being reflected from this object, viz. the color. Say in this case it is green (you might have figured out my favorite color by now). Another child being taught the same thing, also sees that same object, and his brain too elicits a response to the same EM waves. Whether or not the response is same though, we cannot know. Because that response, is a subjective impression and a subjective impression cannot be explained. What we do know though, is that both of these children will be told the color is green, much in the same way as me and you have been told. The next time the brain elicits the same response, they will both say the color is green, whether or not they see the same thing.

Sorry for going off on a tangent there.

What I was trying to prove was that the world is not really what we see, because what we see does not really exist. The sounds we here are nothing but the longitudinal vibrations of the molecules of air around our ears. The fact that we can "hear" "sounds" doesn't mean said "sounds" exist . Because what sound basically is, is the feedback of the brain to the stimulus of the rise and fall in the amplitude and the change in the frequency of the longitudinal waves in the air.

Smell and taste are merely responses of the brain to different types of chemicals hitting the nerve endings in our nose and tongue respectively. Touch is nothing more than a response to the collisions of various surfaces to the nerve endings, or the stimulation of different forms of corpuscles or hair follicles in the skin.

It can be established thus, that our image of the universe is in reality non-existent. It is a compromise or illusion.

But the bigger question that all of this leaves us with is, if all of this is nothing but the firing of electrochemical waves in the axons and dendrites of this network that we so humbly call the nervous system, where do all of these subjective responses go once these cortices in the brain are stimulated? Where does all of this converge, to form the compact whole that we call consciousness?

Of that, we are ignorant still.