Comments About The Man in The Tower

From Present-day Scientists and Thinkers.

While this book was being prepared, we asked a number of scientists and thinkers about the facts it sets forth. Over the Internet, we explained to respected members of select universities how they can never have direct knowledge of matter, and then asked for their views. Most of them stated that this was a most important question to which materialist thought could never provide an answer, and that they themselves could offer no explanation on the subject. A few excerpts from their replies:

We never have direct contact with our environment. Our sensory system makes abstractions of this information. To make things worse, our sensory systems don't even keep that information in the same format—all sensory information (touch, temperature, taste, vision, sound, smells) are changed into electrical and chemical signals in the brain. It's the pattern of these electrical and chemical signals that we refer to as "objects" in our environments . . .

Debra Spear, Ph.D.
Psychology Department

South Dakota State University

… I myself think that we humans are souls, immaterial thinking things causally connected to our bodies in such a way that what we experience/feel/think/etc. depends on the physical states of our brain and central nervous systems.

This is a controversial point of view though. Many think that we humans are material things, big hunks of meat. To your question "Who is the one who sees the image of this message on the brain?" they would answer, "Why, you do, of course!" You, this big hunk of meat, have visual experiences when certain electrical patterns are set up in your brain. Some would say that the visual experiences just are the electrical patterns. In this view, to have the visual sensation of green is just to have a certain electrical pattern set up in your brain—nothing more. Others think that the visual experiences are caused by or perhaps emerge from the electrical patterns, though they are distinct from them.

I myself don't think that our brains do the experiencing, believing, hoping, feeling, etc. I think that "I" do those things and that I am not my brain. I'm closely related to my brain; so closely related that damage to my brain prevents from doing all of these things. But I'm distinct from my brain. What am I? As I see things, I'm a soul.

Dr. Tom Crisp
Department of Philosophy
The Florida State University

People do not like to be disturbed in their daily routine. People want order, they want to be in control, they want things to be as they like them to be. They cannot cope with insecurity and they are afraid of having no answers. They cling to their material possessions and their social positions. They would lose all this if there were no external reality. And people are afraid of being alone, of having to deal with these questions all on their own. They do not trust their own powers of thinking and they are not free. And they don't know who they really are, they define themselves by things outside of them.
That's why [they avoid discussing this matter].

Birte Schelling
Department of Philosophy
University of Hamburg

We think of ourselves as comprised of a body, mind and emotions. However, our fundamental true nature is spirit. The inner light and the answer to most or your questions come from that awareness… [T]he ultimate awareness and intelligence… receives and emits information from within us and around us. Our soul is like an organ of perception for spirit/God to experience the manifest aspects of spirit.

Robert W. Olson, PhD
Author of Stepping Out Within

This is a problem philosophers have worked on for 3000 years… such as when a great tree falls in the forest but there's no one there to hear it… is there a sound?

We certainly are prisoners of our sensory receptive apparatus and our brains. They are the intervening systems which separate us from the physical reality of the world outside ourselves... whatever it may really be. Furthermore, most people don't realize that the sensory tracts systems that carry the external inputs centrally to our brain have interruptions (synapses) at several places along the way. At these synaptic stops, other inputs from various parts of the brain are added… thereby enriching—or contaminating—the input from outside. That's why the same stimulus may at different times "seem" differently to us… the world looks different depending on how we feel. So anyone who thinks he/she experiences the world exactly as it is… is wrong.

Arnold B. Scheibel, MD
Departments of Anatomy and Psychiatry
UCLA

... [T]he image in our brain and our physical surround is something different. Reality... exists only in our brain. We have no way to experience reality except with our brain. A flower is red, because it absorbs a wavelength complementary to red. There is no way of seeing the real wavelength of red, which is 671 nm. The flower appears red because we were told that it is red. And we connect this impression with warmth (fire) or excitement (signal red)... So all the perceptions our brain can make are a mixture of physical and chemical signals which impress us as real, but in reality they are not real.

Prof. Dr. Norbert Hilschmann
(Emeritus)
Director of the Max-Planck-Institute for Experimental Medicine

The image does not depend on light, of course. A blow to the head makes you see stars that are a complete illusion …
What you are describing is true for all sensations. All we ever know of reality is a representation of reality "mapped" onto arrays of brain cells. We sometimes get it wrong, as in the illusion of a "phantom" limb after amputation…
It is theoretically possible that there is nothing out there. That all life is an total illusion. Or that, as in the movie "Matrix", we are real bodies plugged into a computer program which feeds illusory signals of a virtual reality into our brains. There is no way of knowing for certain, if the illusion is a good one.

Andrew Paul Bendrups, MSc
PhD
Department of Human Physiology and Anatomy
La Trobe University, Australia