Everything is an Illusion
In the British Television series called "And Then There Were None", Miss Emily Brent (Played by Miranda Richardson) walks out of a mansion surrounded by a lot of nature, looked at how beautiful the scenery was and said, "Look at how beautiful nature is, it's shocking there are some who don't believe it has a creator" (paraphrased).
And this right here is the exact thought so many of us have. We think the world is so beautiful and wonderful so any argument against a creator is dead on arrival. The rest of us, though, who are probably atheists or have nothing against the arguments that the world probably doesn't have a creator still think and say that the world is beautiful and wonderful.
But the world is not beautiful or wonderful, because everything you see or perceive in any way is just an illusion. There is no beauty in the sky or trees or flowers or waterfalls, but rather it is something in you (your senses) that interprets these things as beautiful. If not for the things in you you wouldn't make anything out of anything.
For example, sugar is not sweet, it is the things inside you (sense of taste) that interprets sugar as sweet and pass it on to your brain. If I threw sugar on a rock the rock wouldn't perceive it as sweet, because it lacks what you have.
The skies and flowers are not beautiful, it is our senses (sight and aesthetic appreciation) that interpret them as beautiful, sands are rocks do not appreciate the beauty of these things because they lack the senses we have. And so on.
And these things in us that make us interpret and sense these things are things that can be removed. For example, if your eyes are removed you can no longer appreciate colours or beauty, those things you would have considered colours and beauty are still there but they're now nothing to you because you've lost something inside you.
If you lose your tongue, no more taste, etc. Also, your brain and all your organs and senses are what make you this being that you are capable of sensing or appreciating anything, if you were to lose them all nothing means anything anymore. So since everything is dependent on certain senses to interpret them as meaningful then they're meaningless. Because on their own they are nothing.
Everything is Blank
Hence nothing is beautiful or wonderful or anything. Everything is just nothing.
Further, what if your senses interpreted things in a different way? What if your senses evolved in a different way and interpreted what we now considered beautiful as ugly? Interpreted red as white? Or black as yellow? We can already see in our world today how people and different creatures view the same thing as different things.
(1) Cats, wolves, foxes, mice, bats and owls all see better at night than during the day. So what is darkness? Is darkness something that impairs vision? No, it's simply our senses that interpret it like that, the above animals interpret it differently.
(2) This is the way a dog sees this image vs how a human sees it:
Now, what is the true look of this image? The answer is that there is no true look, it's all dependent on the senses, the image itself is absolutely nothing besides what the senses make of it.
(3) On autistic people, here is an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking:
On page 289, Gladwell reports:
Robert T. Schultz, once did an experiment with what is called an FMRI (functional magnetic resonance imagery), a highly sophisticated brain scanner that shows where the blood is flowing in the brain at any given time — and hence, which part of the brain is in use. Schultz put people in the FMRI machine and had them perform a very simple task in which they were given either pairs of faces or pairs of objects (such as chairs or hammers) and they had to press a button indicating whether the pairs were the same or different.
Normal people, when they were looking at the faces, used a part of their brain called the fusiform gyrus, which is an incredibly sophisticated piece of brain software that allows us to distinguish among the literally thousands of faces that we know. (Picture in your mind the face of Marilyn Monroe. Ready? You just used your fusiform gyrus.) When the normal participants looked at the chair, however, they used a completely different and less powerful part of the brain — the inferior temporal gyrus — which is normally reserved for objects. (The difference in the sophistication of those two regions explains why you can recognize Sally from the eighth grade forty years later but have trouble picking out your bag on the airport luggage carousel.)
When Schultz repeated the experiment with autistic people, however, he found that they used their object-recognition area for both the chairs and the faces. In other words, on the most basic neurological level, for someone with autism, a face is just another object.
Here is one of the earliest descriptions of an autistic patient in the medical literature: “He never looked up at people’s faces. When he had any dealings with persons at all, he treated them, or rather parts of them, as if they were objects. He would use a hand to lead him. He would, in playing, butt his head against his mother as at other times he did against a pillow. He allowed his boarding mother’s hand to dress him, paying not the slightest attention to her.”
Crazy isn't it? The world is nothing but just something your senses make of it.
The Passage of Time Gives a Lot of Perspective on This
Here is what humans looked like a very long time ago:
Can you imagine living with these people, marrying them, falling in love with them, hugging and kissing them? Of course not because your mind/senses make them out to be hideous. But do you know that if you were born in their time you would have made, loved and had kids with them? 🤣🤣 it would have been normal to you.
Now, after millions of more years, humans would look different from what we look like now and the humans of the future would probably look at us now and be disgusted by us 🤣🤣. They'll say "I can't believe Kim Kardashian was considered beautiful and everyone wanted her! Even Beyonce or Rihanna, you mean these hideous beasts were once the desire of many? I can't stand being in the same room with them 🤣🤣". Just the same way you had looked at those pictures of the old humans.
The End
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