At four o’clock in the morning, while pouring over midterm notes and beginning to realize that they are incomprehensible, some Harvard students might wish that reality was just in their heads. Our ivory tower experts say that this wish may be a distinct possibility.
Professor of Education Catherine Z. Elgin, a specialist in theories of knowledge, says that reality is based on what occurs independently of people and their reactions to these occurrences. But she says there is no way to prove that we do not currently exist in a “Matrix”-like reality, hooked up to machines and submerged in some foreign goo.
Appropriately, Elgin showed the film in her freshman seminar, “Skepticism and Knowledge.”
“We have theories of perception, theories of judgment, theories of evidence,” says Elgin, “[and] over time we can discover mistakes in our previous representations of things, but that doesn’t satisfy the question, can we truly be wrong about things.”
And as if that isn’t unnerving enough, Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences Diego A. Pizzagalli, who currently teaches Psychology 18: “Abnormal Psychology,” says that there are many disorders in which a person’s reality can become skewed, like schizophrenia. According to Pizzagalli, there is typically no way a person can tell if he is schizophrenic because his delusions and hallucinations would appear very real.
Watch out—that date with a hot chick might be a just a figment of your imagination.
So how do we know we exist at all? Are chemicals in our brains busy at work, creating consciousness?
“We don’t have a clue what causes consciousness,” says Associate Professor of Psychiatry Robert A. Stickgold.
Very reassuring.
