Blue Room
October 19, 2006
You are in an empty squared room painted blue. You perceive it as sitting on a meadow where a girl in front say to you: “Dear, you’re not not sitting in a meadow here with me, you’re in a blue room.”
Questions, dull, easy or weird, as per your taste:
- Who perceived reality?
- Have you perceived reality correctly?
- Perceived it at all?
Perhaps the answers lies in what you emphasize, what impressions you believe the most. How you define human’s process of perception. Whether it’s ok to perceive reality through a synthetic impression.
October 19, 2006 at 11:23 am
Our reality is what we get from our senses.
Whenver you feel pain for example, our eyes and ears register what caused this pain. That’s a sense of reality. (for me)
However, I’m under the impression that nobody will ever be able to perceive all of reality. We simply lack senses or our senses are not developed enough. For example, most of us do not see infrared.
Maybe it can be compared with an analog to digital converter. The analog signal being the real signal, and the digital signal is what we perceive of reality. There will always be a conversion error. So, our view of reality is always different from the real reality.
So my answers to your questions:
1. Not who, but what. What perceived reality? Our senses.
2. Nobody will because our senses are not perfect or we lack certain senses.
3. Nobody ever has and probably ever will.
October 19, 2006 at 12:46 pm
1 – I did. I’m alone in the room, so even if it was inconsciously, it was me who detected reality and informed myself through a fake girl i made up.
2 – Yes and no. In an inner level i did, but my conscience is absorbed onto a fake reality.
3 – As per 1 and 2, yes i did, just not in a conscious level. The problem will be convincing myself…
October 19, 2006 at 2:01 pm
This is one of the classic problems of philosophy and the one which prompted Descarte to write Meditations on First Philosophy which was basically the beginning of modern philosophy. See The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell for more modern take.
October 20, 2006 at 7:11 am
Your first sentence is “You are in an empty squared room painted blue.” If this is a universal truth, then whoever does not perceive it has not correctly perceived reality. If it is only the girl’s perception, then both you and her must challenge their beliefs and investigate further to discover the reality (perhaps the room is in fact green?)
October 31, 2006 at 11:04 pm
http://www.kaylajones.wordpress.com..been there done that.
November 17, 2006 at 9:03 pm
[…] Now, that was an idea! So I put my thinking cap on and came to remember a post I’d seen around on the WP.com combine. I took the first question from that post and pasted it into the text box on AQA’s webpage, plugged in my number and hit ‘Send’. […]