How would you prove it to me that I'm alive? I've come to believe that the entirety of reality as I perceive it is created by the definitions that my mind has assigned to it. I don't think it's possible for anyone to prove to me that they really exist outside of my mind. If you pinch me, and it hurts, it is because my perception has defined the pinch as a source of specific physical sensation. What about a song I hear that evokes an emotional response, surely that couldn't be a figment of my imagination? Why not? I've written songs in my dreams that I never would've written while awake. How do you tell if you're awake or dreaming? You might say, it's easy to tell when you are awake. Why is that? Is it so easy to tell when you are dreaming? Everyone has dreams they are sure are real until they end, how can we be sure of anything being real. Besides, what is real? I had mentioned definitions. We each shape reality by a framework of definitions in our mind. If we can change the definition, we change reality. We actually only change how we perceive that aspect of reality but how is that different? It has been theorized that every one of us has the power to change the past, simply by believing it to have been changed. We never realize that we've changed the past, because all of the memories are changed at the same time. This calls to mind an experiment I read about called the "Double Slit" experiment. It was originally devised in the 19th century to try and determine if light were a wave or was made up of particles. It was reworked just recently involving a device, a filter, that counted photons as they passed through the slits. I won't bore you with the intended purpose of  the experiment, but instead will talk of the unexpected effect. They found that the nature of light, as perceived, actually changed when measured. They shone a light through two slits, the wave properties of light caused an interference pattern on the projection surface. This was expected. However, when they activated the device to count the photons as they passed through the filter, the interference pattern vanished. So, when they shone the light expecting an interference pattern, due to the wave nature of light, that is what they got. However, when they tried to measure light as particles, the wave pattern vanished, leaving light behaving as though it is particles rather than waves. But it gets even stranger. There were three ways to run the experiment, photon counter on, photon counter off, and running the experiment, and making the decision whether or not to turn on the photon counter later. I know it doesn't make much sense, but the results are astounding. They got the same results as always when they turned the counter off or on. But, they ran the experiment (Which was analyzed by a computer giving them the results after the fact) without deciding whether to turn the counter on or not, then deciding after running the experiment, to turn on the counter (or off), the result was always as it would've been had they made the decision before running the experiment. How do you explain this? Let me tell this experiment in an analogy. It's like placing a camera in a room with a timer to take a picture at a particular time. Then, either turning the lights on, or off. If the lights were off, you get a picture of a dark room, if they're on, you see the room. Simple? With this experiment it was like they put the camera in the room, let it snap the picture then, after the picture had been taken, deciding to have the lights be off in the room. The camera would have taken a picture of a dark room. If the decision had been made, again after the picture had been taken, to have the lights on in the room, then the picture would reveal a lighted room. It is as if light itself responds to the decisions we make, to reveal what we expect to see. This is evidence that decisions we make actually do affect the world around us. This begins to sound very much like lucid dreaming. In a lucid dream, you can change reality all around you because it is all taking place inside your mind. The only limit is that of your imagination. But now, we begin to see that we have the same effect on waking reality, although the scope may not be the same.

So what does this have to do with me wondering whether I'm alive or dead? Well, it seems that in waking reality our decisions affect the universe, at the very least, on the quantum level. When dreaming, our decisions also affect reality. And if we can have dreams that we cannot distinguish from waking reality, how do we know we are not dreaming right now? And what is death but a dream from which we cannot awaken?

EDIT: Danielle's comment below contains a link to a wonderful little cartoon from the extended version of "What the Bleep do we Know, Anyway" (A must see!) about the Double slit experiment that illustrates it much more eloquently than I have above.


(For those of you expecting the usual Saturday "Lyrical Saturday" or "Story of a song" installments, I've decided to move them to the middle of the week, since they are easy posts I can make with little free time. I'll reserve the weekend for postings that I spend a bit more time and thought on.) (Well, it was Saturday when I started typing this. It's now Sunday. Bah.)