Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

220 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
between the two. We never do experience reality, only the models our
brains have created. There is no theoretical reason why we could not someday
design a machine that would provide a virtual reality that would be
indistinguishable from everyday reality. The only difference between the
actual and the virtual would then be that the one is a more accurate model
of what really exists.
This is known as the “argument from illusion.” In essence, it reasons
that the information provided by our senses, the images of reality our perception
provides us, cannot be trusted. They could all be illusions. Yet those
images exist. They lead us reasonably to infer a physical world which we
believe in because we can make accurate predictions based on those “physical
inferences.” Unfortunately, those inferences and the model of the world
they create for us do not provide a clear understanding of the images as
images. Where do they exist? Where could they exist but inside our
brains? If you look at a familiar object, say a card table, the image you
perceive is not the same as the dimensional object you “know” it to be. If
asked to describe the tabletop you might say that it was brown in color and
square in shape, yet the shape you actually perceive—unless you are looking
at it from directly above—is some sort of parallelogram. The actual
color will vary according to lighting conditions of intensity and direction.
If the surface is shiny, parts of it may even appear white. A photograph, or
even a painting, could provide you with a similar image. The image is not
the reality, yet the image exists. Where could it exist except inside your
brain? We never really “see” anything but the insides of our own minds.
What Is Mind?
Common sense tells us there must be more to mind than differences in
time and distance, but common sense is not enough for the scientists. The
greatest difficulty stems from the fact that mind and matter seem so impossibly
different that there seems to be no common ground on which to
base a comparison. Even when philosophers attempt to analyze the specific
qualities we know to characterize mind, the terminology is never as precise
as that used to describe the mathematical world of physics. The two most
important of these qualities, for our purposes, are “intentionality” and
“unity.” Intentionality refers to the fact that many mental states are
“about” something; they refer to something other than themselves. Beliefs,
desires, and fears do not exist by themselves; they must be about
something. I have a belief that the sun will rise in the east; I have a desire