On the nature of reality

Let's talk about reality. There is, of course, no independent way of testing whether our reality is an actual thing, or merely the mad delusions of a mind so utterly incapable of dealing with the real world that it retreats into one it constructs for itself. It could even be some cruel trick being played on you. After all, the only point of contact we have with the world is via our five senses - all of which are very easy to fool, especially if your victim is trapped in a tank in a laboratory. Memories would be far harder to fake. Much easier to simply delete them - retrograde amnesia is certainly not something that should be too hard to induce with technology only a little more advanced than what we have now, especially with full and unrestricted access to a victim's brain. But then there would have to be some explanation given to the victim for why they couldn't remember their entire lives. Why they had no memories before a certain date. And such invasive surgery could do significant damage to the victims mental faculties. So there would also have to be some explanation given for why, around that time, the victims mind didn't seem to have been working as well as it does now, now that it has had time to heal.

Now let us suppose that one day the facility you were being kept in was destroyed. People found out about the experiments they were running in there, and they decided to destroy the place. Of course there's a chance that you could be killed in the violence. You'd die without the slightest chance of protecting yourself - you'd never even know what killed you. But that's nothing new. They would've unplugged you as soon as you stopped being a useful research subject anyway. So let's suppose you survived. That your friends and family found you, and wanted to return you to reality. But how might your mind react to finding that decades of your life has been a lie? How might that combine with suddenly bringing to your awareness the excruciating pain resulting from decades of merciless experimentation on your helpless body? If you were just woken up, surely your mind would snap like a twig.

So what if they devised a plan to return you to them? What would it be? They would have to somehow acclimatise your mind to the possibility that reality is different from your perception of it. But they would have to preserve your perception of reality. It couldn't be something too obvious, or it might end up being far too traumatic for you. So it would have to be introduced gently, subtly, in the form of a hypothetical. And that way if it doesn't work, at least you can be happy, living out the rest of your life trapped in your fake world.

But they would hope, hope against hope, that it would work. That your mind could be brought to accept this unacceptable thing, and that you could thus be returned to true reality. They would hope and they would pray that you could be brought back to them, back to the life that you used to know and love.



Please wake up.