316 Self and the Phenomenon of Life
b2726 Self and the Phenomenon of Life: A Biologist Examines Life from Molecules to Humanity “9x6”of its own, thanks to the presence or absence of certain sense organs.
A dog, for instance, lives in a world of odor mostly oblivious to its master.
A bat constructs the world with its ultrasonic radar machine. A shark
maps changes in electrical potential in its surroundings. Humans, by
contrast, rely very much on detecting, by sight, a limited range of the
electromagnetic wave spectrum. Even within humankind, every per-
son’s world is somewhat different from those of others, being influenced
by differences in attention, interest, emotion, experience and culture.
(Note that people witnessing the same incident frequently provide con-
flicting reports.) Our nervous system sets a limiting condition for the
reconstruction of the world out of the raw materials available in the envi-
ronment. The raw materials in the physical world are presumably real
and constant, but the derived physical world is unique to each person.
What is the reality of a tree falling? Does it really fall? If I actually
see it, and hear it, falling, then my mental reality has a primary construct
(out of raw sensory data) of the tree falling; i.e., I perceive its fall. If I do
not witness it but hear someone reporting it, then I will have a secondary
construct of a tree falling, a mental reality assembled by reshuffling
pre-existing sensory data stored in my memory. Both instances are men-
tal activities. Then, from my own mental reality, I project outwardly a
physical reality in which the tree falls. The physical reality becomes a
fact if the experience is shared with many people, or if the event can be
verified again and again, especially not only by sight but also by touch.
By now the objectivity of the tree falling is established. Once complete,
such as when the event is reported in the newspaper, it finally becomes
independent of my mental activity. But note that whatever the means of
arrival at objectivity, the starting point is always the mental reality.
In everyday life, the hallmarks of reality are endurance and consis-
tency. A phenomenon that is fleeting and cannot be observed a second
time is less likely to be real than one that has staying power. Likewise,
two observations that are contradictory cannot both be real. Dreams dif-
fer from time to time, and from one to another. Even in the same dream,
events are usually inconsistent. Thus dreams are not real despite the