Are Mental Images Real? :: Reality Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Are Mental Images Real?This essay was my first stab at defining and discussing existentity for my freshman seminar, What is Reality?. Using a fishy topic of realness (in this case -- are psychogenic images real?), we were to attempt a working definition and method for determing that which is real. Pretty lousy, Im not gonna lie, but an evoke assignment. In the middle of the night, a boy awakes from the most horrifying label scene hes ever witnessed, terrified in a cold sweat. His heart is pounding, hes lost his breath. And yet he wakes to the comfortable knowledge that it was all just a dream. The brainpower is a strange entity, in that it is essentially our guide to that which we experience - it perceives, processes, interprets, analyzes, and utterly convinces. We act physiologically to our minds wills, be it with elevated heart rates, elation, or a ingrained sense of confusion in the inability to distinguish between what our mind says and what we know to be true. Herein we see the quandary of existence as human beings in society are the images and experiences of our mind truly real? To a schizophrenic, a hallucination in which he is attacked by a big black dog is as real to him as a true assault by a New York mugger. Where, then, is the line cadaverous between a pure mental image and reality, and what does this say virtually the nature of reality? Enlightened philosopher Rene Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, claiming the reality and validity of his existence based on the inner workings of his mind. The mental images and experiences he had were, to him, the fundamental proof that, as an entity, he was truly usable and definite. Yet how many of us have, at one point or another, asked ourselves, Is this really happening? and, despite the knowledge that we must be intended to be questioning thusly, still couldnt verify or bring low the reality of the situation? To quote a classmate in a discussion about the nature of existence, All that ind ividual existentialism textile sounds pretty funky, but youve got to believe in it for it to work. Indeed, the idea that reality is created or destroyed by ones own willingness to exist is a terrifying and thought-provoking concept, riddled with metaphysical questions of procedure and mechanics of life. Do peoples minds allow them to know of their own horrifying and howling(a) deaths, or is there perhaps an I-am-dying-peacefully-in-my-sleep hormone released when the body becomes aware of its quad peril?