Where are your fingers?!

Hey, welcome back! Where are your fingers?

Let me tell you about an incident before we begin. Tonda Lynn Ansley of Ohio shot and killed her landlady in 2002. She claimed she was in the matrix and that her crimes were not real. And guess what? Using the matrix defence, she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, because the opposing viewpoint is simply far more healthy and common. Isn't it creepy?

Now, let us return to our original question! Seriously. It's a simple question. You should be able to respond. But how are you sure? How can anyone possibly know anything? You could argue, "Well, I know where my fingers are." I'm staring them down. Or, I can touch and feel them; they're right here, which is good. Your senses are an excellent way to learn. In fact, we have far more than the five senses that are commonly discussed. Consider your kinesthetic sense and proprioception.

It allows you to tell where your fingers, arms, head, and legs are in relation to each other without having to look or touch anything else. We have far more than five senses; we have at least twice as many, if not more. However, they are not without flaws. There are optical, audio, and temperature sensation illusions, as well as tactile illusions. Can you, for example, turn your tongue upside down? If so, that's fantastic. Run your finger along the outer edge of your upside-down tongue's tip. Your tongue will feel your finger, but only in the wrong place.

Our brains never needed to learn how to touch our tongues upside down. So, if you touch the right side of your tongue while it's flipped over to the left side, you'll feel a sensation on the opposite side, where your tongue normally is but isn't when it's upside down. It's pretty freaky, cool, and humbling, because it demonstrates the limits of the accuracy of our senses, our only tools for determining what's out there in here. Epistomology is the philosophy of knowledge, or the study of knowing.

What exactly are memories? Memory is created physically by the rapid firing of neurons in the brain.

Look closely at this branching forest of firing neurons. It could be a vivid memory of your first date. Could I make you forget your first date, or even where your fingers are, if I went into your brain and cut out those cells? Yes! But only if I remove a large portion of your brain. Because memories are stored all over the brain, not just in one relationship. The events leading up to your first date are stored in one network, the way it felt, the food, and the way her perfume smelled in different networks, all summing up to form your first date memory.

But I'm curious how many memories you can fit inside your head. What is the human brain's storage capacity? We can only make educated guesses given the number of neurons in the brain involved in memory and the number of different connections a single neurone can make. According to Paul Reber of Northwestern University, we can store the digital equivalent of about 2.5 petabytes of information. A Petabyte equals 1,000 Terabytes. According to some estimates, a Petabyte is the equivalent of 20 million tall filing cabinets or 500 billion standard printed pages.

So the total capacity of the human brain is equivalent to continuously recording a TV channel for 300 years. That's a lot of details. That's a lot of information about skills you can learn, facts, people you've met, and real-world experiences.

Isn't the world real? How did you find out? It's a difficult question, but it's not rocket science. Instead, it inquires as to whether or not rocket scientists exist at all!

The theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth worked wonderfully. It predicted that the Sun would rise every morning, and it was correct. We didn't realise what we thought was true was actually false until much later. So, do we or will we ever know true reality, or are we trapped in a world where the best we can hope for is to be roughly true? Every day, more and more useful theories are discovered, but we never reach true objective actual reality. Can science or logic ever prove that your friends, family, Emma Watson, or even your fingers exist outside of your mind? That you don't simply exist in the matrix?

No!

Even if you use instruments such as a telescope or particle accelerators, your mind is all you have. You are the ultimate destination for all of that data. Because you are alone in your own mind, it is technically impossible to prove that anything else exists. The egocentric predicament is what it's called. Everything you know about the outside world is dependent on and created within your brain. This was so important to Charles Sanders Peirce that he drew a distinction between reality, or the way the universe truly is, and the phaneron, or the world as filtered through our senses and bodies, which is the only information we can obtain. If you want to speak with certainty, you must react to, remember, and experience your phaneron rather than reality. Solipsism is the belief that only you exist and that everything else, including food, the universe, your friends and even Emma Watson are all figments of your imagination.

It is impossible to convince or persuade a solipsist that the outside world exists. And there is no way to persuade someone who doubts that the universe, along with all of our memories, was not created just three seconds ago. It's a terrifying realisation that we don't always know how to handle. The belief that the outside world exists independently of your own phaneron is known as realism. Even if you weren't alive to witness it, rocks, stars, and Emma Watson would continue to exist. However, you cannot be certain that realism is correct. You can only believe.

But consider cats: they have no idea what a laser spot is, but that small red spot fascinates and excites them! We're not all that different, except instead of that small laser spot, we have the mysteries of the universe to contend with. We will never be able to comprehend them all. We will never be able to answer every single question, but walking around in those questions and exploring them is enjoyable.

It feels great.

As always, thank you for reading!