![]() ![]() ![]() Indeed, some philosophers have asked an even more troubling question: how do we know that there is a world beyond our own minds at all? We’ve all had experiences that seemed incredibly lifelike – for instance, dreams (or nightmares) – but that we later learned to be figments of our imagination. If that were the case, would we even be able to tell? The Hering illusion: are the red lines straight, or bowed? Courtesy Wikipedia Perhaps the ‘real world’ lies somewhere beyond our mundane experiences. ![]() Perhaps the world in which we think we live is just an elaborate ruse designed to accommodate us or an artificially implanted memory. Movies such as Shutter Island (2010) and Total Recall (1990) have shown what such a mismatch between our knowledge and reality might look like with dramatic flair (apologies for spoiling a decade-old and a three-decade-old movie, respectively). How can we be sure that the world we think we know is the real world? After all, we’ve all been mistaken before – a person in a store window might turn out to be a mannequin, or two lines that appear to be curved might actually be parallel – so how can we be certain we know reality as it truly is? Ever since Plato started telling stories about people trapped in caves, philosophers have pondered the relationship between the mind and reality. ![]()
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