午夜剧场

If you write the same character over and over again, eventually it stops being a character and starts to look like a simple pattern without meaning. This phenomenon is called Gestalt collapse; in this case, the meaning and sound are stripped away from the character, leaving only a strange two-dimensional pattern. Similarly (though it requires a bit of training), if you cause the landscape before your eyes to undergo Gestalt collapse, its reality is stripped away from the actual world, leaving only pure sensory qualities. In the world of philosophy, from ancient times to the present day, these sensory qualities have been called representations, phenomena, or qualia, and have been the subject of research.

In daily life, sensory qualities are considered to convey the appearance of the world as it is. However, the quality of "red" does not exist in the real world independently of a specific visual system. The color red is a representation created within the human mind by the human visual system. Setting aside for now the extremely difficult question of why the mind can create representations, how can we link these representations to reality?

This problem is similar to the question of how two people can relate two separate dreams they are having to one another. While it might seem impossible, surprisingly, we have actually succeeded in linking reality and representation. The fact that we can lead a communal life shows that humanity has already succeeded in relating these "two dreams."

Unless we believe that no matter how many human consciousnesses there are, they are all independent and each person is merely dreaming a long, grand dream of life (solipsism), or that the contents of each consciousness are adjusted by God to be in harmony (pre-established harmony), our world of representation is linked to the real world. But how exactly?

It is dangerous to mistake a dream for reality. However, there is no problem with regarding a representation as reality. In a sense, we are dreaming a "safe dream," but by what mechanism and how did we acquire such safety? I hope to contribute from the field of philosophy to help humanity solve this mystery.