Hello mortals. The night sky is dark, chocolate is sweet,
your friendship circles will shrink with time. These are all facts that constitute our reality. Your reality, better said. A reality, that is actually not really real,
as you’ll soon see. Take this apple – red, solid, crunchy. Except this is not the real apple, this is
the human-brain apple. Show it to some alien with a different visible
spectrum, and you get this – the alien-brain apple. And maybe the alien has razor-sharp teeth,
and when they bite into the apple, it doesn’t make that crunchy sound at all. The point is, both the human and the alien
apples are different interpretations of the same object – the real apple. And if you remove any observers and their
subjective perspectives, how would this objective apple look like? And this applies to the entire universe. Anything that you see, hear and feel is just
your subjective interpretation of the objective reality. Although a bit different, Plato’s theory
of forms claims there is a non-physical perfect form of every object, of which the real objects
are mere interpretations. We have established that your brain acts as
some sort of reality converter, from the objective to the subjective one that you perceive right
now. Your brain converts photons into colors, air
disturbances into sound, and nerve signals into sensory information. These subjective experiences are called “qualia”. But remove the converter, and reality stops
making sense. There still will be photons, sound waves and
temperature, but there will be no more colors, sounds or sensory feelings. There is a thought experiment that explores
this topic: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make
a sound?". The tree will make disturbances in the air
when falling, but it will not generate the sensation of sound that we’re accustomed
to. Without any observers, the universe would
exist, but without any qualia such as colors, temperatures or even the speed of the flow
of time. Without anyone to observe it, the entire lifespan
of the universe might very well last an instant, or conversely – an eternity. Similarly, the past only exists inside your
brain, in the form of memories. The objective reality only exists during the
infinitesimally small instance called the present. You could even argue that because the present
is so short-lived, your consciousness becomes aware of it only after it has become the past. So you are only experiencing the past. And now, a very quick announcement. I have added a few nice things to my merch
store with the link in the description below. Get yourself a nice mug or shirt and support
SkyNet and the channel. Especially this week only, you can profit
off the Black Friday sales! And that’s not all! Remember that red apple? What if your red isn’t the same as someone
else’s red? You could have both lived your entire lives
agreeing on the colors, even though you could have had different qualia in regards to that. How do you know that my voice generates the
same sound inside your head that it would in someone else’s? That cannot be proven. So let’s just pretend that our subjective
realities are the same for the sake of our sanity. Oh, and how about this. How do you know that anything outside of your
perceptions inside your brain is real? What if all these qualia are artificially
simulated and in reality, you are just a consciousness trapped inside a laboratory? I know this is very relieving to hear, but
there’s nothing we can do to prove or disprove it. However, the Occam’s Razor rule tells us,
that the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, and a trapped consciousness
is a lot more complex of an explanation than just simply having real experiences. But in the end, the one and only thing that
you can be sure of, is that your consciousness exists. If you can doubt your existence, you have
to exist in order to doubt it. As Rene Descartes said “I think, therefore
I am. And check Sciencephile’s merch store”.
