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| Solitude and Solace |
You are leading a very active life, and have experienced decades of memories. Then, without warning, you are in an horrible accident and are totally, even more than quadriplegically paralyzed. Your brainstem is damaged such that it has no way to contact your five senses. No sensation from your toes even to the very tip of your head. No sense of touch or feeling at all, nor any ability to move any part of your body. You are completely stone deaf. Your eyes never recover from the accident and you remain blind. Your sense of smell doesn't work whatsoever. You have no taste at all as you bit your tongue off in the accident.
Since you have no sense of touch, you never know when or if you are eating. You never know when you're making a smelly mess on the floor or in your pants. You would lay in a bed, utterly dependent on a hospital-type institution for life.
But you would be alive. They would maintain your life by machine since your cerebrum, as shown on their brain scanners, was still fully functional. Only the brainstem was damaged beyond repair. The higher brain is totally undamaged and even healthy. The doctors would even speculate that you are conscious, awake, and alert. They call this condition "Locked-in".
You'd never have any sensory input to your brain if you had none of the five senses. Nothing. Your brain would be totally, completely, utterly alone. The essence of what is truly you would have only itself. Yourself. You'd probably go insane, for all practical purposes. And why not? You'd never know if you were dying since you would not feel pain, and would never know when to be afraid. When death arrived, would you even know it? Or perhaps just experience a quiet, orderly transition from thought to no-thought.
Would reality have any meaning if you had no way of knowing what was going on in this reality? Think about it. You'd have no input or output to anything in the outside world. You wouldn't even know if it existed anymore.
So would you just build some huge, elaborate lucid dream, forming your own reality; one that is controlled not by the Laws of Physics but by the Limits on the Dreamer's Imagination? Limitless, for all practical purposes. Wow! You have totally left reality. You have entered a reality dictated by your will and the power of your mind. No fear, pain, helplessness, embarrassment. You could be President of the United States - or the world for that matter. Fly into space at 10 times the speed of light. Do anything, with or to anyone, anytime.
You would be like a living thinking brain in a computer-controlled vat of chemicals.
What would you think about? Can you stop thinking things if your brain is still alive?
I have described a person in a waking coma, whose brain is still alive, but severed from the body by injury.
Is his world as real as mine?
Am I in a coma right now?
Would I want to leave it if I were?
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