you are reading the words on the screen via sensory input through your eyes and decoding their familiar meaning with that lump you call a frontal lobe or something that isn't very far away from it. the characters appearing on the monitor are only constructively meaningful because you made them that way (this, however is no cause to extract support for a post-modernistic viewpoint because quite frankly, post-modernism, secular humanism, and things akin to folly should remain with those who wish to dabble merely in diction.) i digress...and return to the meaningless scribbles. think back to the earliest place which you first were blessed to read the english (or whichever tongue you so choose) language. undoubtedly, it was on bottles, packages, the glorified media hound-box called the tele, etcetera. another step towards my point, you never did understand them until caretaker(s, hopefully) dearest said "this is a dog." henceforth begins the journey into intelligent understanding we call learning.
this, however, is not the focus of my thoughts. the orthocenter of my scrambled inner-mumblings is the authority by which we subscribe to truth. again, i do not wish to diagnose my hypotheticals as merely those of a cowardly anarchist, confined to the intangible chamber of the counter-cultural internet king. i just wish to combine a few recent trains of thought. i recently saw Inception with the terribly hunky Leonardo DiCaprio. i'll say that i was, at the very least, entertained by it. but i couldn't help but think back to my understanding of the Cartesian systematic theory of doubt. for those ignorant to both Inception and Descartes read the inlay. for those who understand both, you may resume reading below the inlay.
Inception is about the ability to place a thought into someone's brain while they are sleeping via complicated sedatives and machinery. without giving too much of the story away, you cannot simply give someone a thought. you may give them the beginning of a thought at the most basic level, but it must mature in their own mind.
Descartes had a systematic theory of doubt which began by doubting the senses and any information that came from them (such as the learning from others as discussed above) and completed with an evil genius who controlled Descartes' everything. Descartes concluded that he truly existent because he was thinking (most famously put [and misquoted] "i think therefore i am.")finally, the driving question (sorry for taking so long to get here...the matrix glitched or something.) suppose i was being fed thoughts from someone else, even if it were from another human. what if i did experience an infinite regress of realities only to be construed as dreams? i believe that whomever was controlling that (such as what happened in Inception) would be in direct control of my reality and therefore, my thoughts. how can i then begin to say that my existence is my own? along the same trail, does something like a computer possess it's very own existence, despite the fact that it is completely built to cater to the existence of another, literally programmed to do so? let's leave religion out of this for a minute, a suppose that we are not our own people (to the Christians amidst the readers, i know this to be a bit of a contradictory statement and you need not tell me that it is.) bluntly put, imagine that you are being fed every detail of your life. your senses are controlled by someone else who sits behind a giant control panel pushing your buttons (literally). because truly they need to fabricate at most a few areas with at most one in detail. (you can experience something on the television with the same detail as you can on in real life, until sony makes "sony: lifeDefinition") and flowing from that, why is there heartache? why is there anything but complete elation? is it because your controller had a miserable childhood? if so, what was it like...?
lots of question and no answers as usual. just a thought experiment.
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