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Am I really alive? One of the longest, ongoing debates throughout history is whether or not man can decern reality from an mentally altered perception of reality. Science fiction movies about living brains in jars, a night with Ebanzeer Scrooge and the Matrix all pose this paradox. Fundamentally there is a 'movie' running in our head that defines what we think is real. Live or Memorex? The accumulation of everything weve past experienced, seen, heard, felt and and learned - coupled with what your senses are telling you right now, defines reality. All the little details like the your weight against the chair, the texture of your pants against your legs, well basically your perception of who you, are is simply a collection of electro-chemical firings feeding into an self changing endless loop. Billions and billions of flashes that both process realtime sensations and retrieved memories drive us into behaving, feeling and living as you as an individual. Say you die, sorry, and the doctors swiftly extract your brain into a machine that has everyting you've experienced and have come to accept as real, your 'movie'. Now allow yourself the humility of accepting that there is no way of differentiating between your life and your new formaldehyde condo life. You cant. If you hold to the "if I touch something it must be real" or feel this scenario wreaks of Sci-Fi, then these excerpts will be just that. Could your brain live in a jar? The driving force of my little obsession is the fact that during my psychosis, or what ever it was, I experienced my own passing. Everything from the sound of a monitors flat line, a awful trip thought the crematorium and ending with my funeral. After waiting days ( seemingly ) around in total sensory deprivation I started to anticipate what the afterlife was like. Heaven, hell or something else must be waiting for me cause I coudnt hang around here forever - then I slowly crept back. I saw the hospital room, lined with doctors and family dissolve into view. " I guess I made it. " The frustrating thing is not knowing if you are dead and just experiencing built in 'programs' in the form of chemical/synaptic firings. Seriously think about it - If you died and entered a new state ( heaven ) maybe the Almighty deems a environmental simulation, if you will, to limit increase the ease of weaning into death. Here's my Frankenstien postulation on how the brains alterlife could be programmed and played-back unbeknownst to the person. Let's postulate how this could be done mechanically: |