If our conscious awareness of the world is based on electrical impulses racing through our brains, what happens when those subatomic streaks take a different path?
How do we know that we know what we think we know? What can we really prove? What can we truly know at all? Why do we want "proof" anyway?
Proof is about confirming our inner experience by some exterior means. It gives us a sense of equilibrium, of time and space.
After all, without a clock or horizon line, how can we know we even exist at all?
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A Personal Note
I know there’s a sharp object when I bang against even the edge of my bed. The next day, blood and bruising appears on my right knee, the one I shattered when I fell in August. Shifts in weather, as when the barometric pressure goes up and down, cause pain both my knees. Weather is the fish bowl wherein I glub glub glub. Crossing a street one rainy day after a date in college, I was wacked by a Volkswagen making the wrong turn, and I went skidding over the wet street, ripping my best suit pants open. Nobody can philosophize away the real world.
Still that doesn’t mean what I see is all that is there. I remember sitting in my mother’s apartment in the nursing home and watching my mother fixated over a pile of her pills that she was obsessively studying, picking up, putting down, looking at the chart I had made for her, turning back to the pills, checking them out again, hesitating, putting one in the pill box, turning back, and so on. Synapses in her brain had snapped after the last stroke. The simplest of tasks became magnified and harrowing. That did not mean that the table on which those pills rested, or the pills themselves did not exist. Instead, what was starting to lose identity was my own mother.
[Disposable Prose February 6, 2010]
Dr. Mike
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