My previous two posts have been on the subject of two philosophical questions found in the BBC’s online magazine; in this post, I’d like to look at question number three:
Is that really a computer screen in front of you?
I have to chuckle at this one—it is essentially asking the reader if anything can be known since there is no way to verify if one’s senses (vision, hearing, smell) are correct. However, I feel I must castigate the writer of the article for confusing the issue somewhat. The passage describes two issues: the fact that the senses are often beguiled into perceiving something that is untrue, and the fact that subjective reality has yet to be disproven (meaning that there is no way to externally verify if what we are perceiving actually exists).
The two topics sound similar, but in fact they are very different. The first assumes that there is such a thing as objective reality, and that we can perceive and interact with it using our senses. In this case, the only time we are deceived is when our senses are confused by some kind of illusion, such as the one above.
The second case has more in common with objective reality than with illusion. This case assumes that the senses are correct, but the sense data they perceive is not related to what the universe actually is. Or, in a similar variant, objective reality does not exist at all, and the sense-data is not actually tied to a real object. Because there is no way to externally verify if what the senses are perceiving is correct, it is impossible to know if subjective reality exists or not.
Though coalescing the two topics into one is incorrect, on the whole I agree with the article in both cases. It is impossible to verify if our senses are correct, and there very well may not be a computer screen in front of you.
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