Or, the universe is a joint product of the observer and the observed. For example: In many science fiction movies a person’s ego or self enters into the brain of another person, gaining control of his or her actions and existence. In the movies he or she can see through the eyes of the person or creature he or she now occupies. This is because the popular thought structure is that we live in an objective universe and our bodies are just meat machines carrying around cameras that send messages to our egos that are watching the wide screens. No, in fact it is exactly the opposite of this. From Incognito…
“When Mike May was three years old, a chemical explosion rendered him completely blind. … Then, forty-three years after the explosion robbed him of his vision, he heard about a new surgical development that might be able to restore it.
After the operation, the bandages were removed from around his eyes. Accompanied by a photographer, Mike sat on a chair while his two children were brought in. This was a big moment. It would be the first time he would ever gaze into their faces with his newly cleared eyes. In the resulting photograph, Mike has a pleasant but awkward smile on his face as his children beam at him.
There was a problem. Mike’s eyes were now working perfectly, but he stared with utter puzzlement at the objects in front of him. His brain didn’t know what to make of the barrage of inputs. He wasn’t experiencing his sons’ faces; he was experiencing only un-interpretable sensations of edges and colors and lights. Although his eyes were functioning, he didn’t have vision.
And this is because the brain has to learn how to see. The strange electrical storms inside the pitch-black skull get turned into conscious summaries after a long haul of figuring out how objects in the world match up across the senses. Consider the experience of walking down a hallway. Mike knew from a lifetime of moving down corridors that walls remain parallel, at arm’s length, the whole way down. So when his vision was restored, the concept of converging perspective lines was beyond his capacity to understand. It made no sense to his brain.”
So Mike had to “learn to see.” Given the incredible genetic diversity of each individual, the universe that each of us creates is our alone. So if you were transposed into the mind-body of another, you would recognize nothing and would fall and stumble about.
