Thursday, December 8, 2011

The Inverse Color Differential aka Anti-Sky Paradox

I am not a scientist and I've never professed otherwise.  In fact I take a certain amount of pride in my superior right-brained skills even if it came at the price of my left brain.  So what if my analytical left brain functions are a little diminished?  That's the cross I embraced in high school when I took my first taste of a recreational substance and smiled.  Admittedly it's been both uphill and downhill since then.  But I have never complained about being illiterate where science and math are concerned.  Generally I accept scientific principles, even if I don't always understand them.  Certainly I accept mathematics and the legitimacy of the study of calculus while I clearly do not understand it.  Nevertheless, evolution is a hell of a lot easier to swallow than creationism.  That's a fact.  Anyone who believes humans were made in the likeness and image of a mythical super-being should check their brain for tumors.  But I am no scientist.

I exist somewhere in the metaphorical middle ground between evolution and fantasy.  Now if anyone is still reading at this point let me make clear that this is not the introduction to an atheistic rant.  On the contrary, it's a theory I came up with, one that unilaterally mocks all known scientific principles and everything else that decidedly left-brain people hold dear.


February 25, 2009 (all dates are approximations)

I close my eyes and enjoy the relaxing nature of the couch. I feel as though I am in the middle of a cloud, a nice, fluffy, white, smoky cloud of pure comfort. It’s dense but it allows me to float peacefully within it, untainted with feelings of discontentedness. I open my eyes and try to peer out the window but the blue sky outside is barely visible through this cloud all around me. I can somehow tell that the sky is blue, yet I start to wonder if that is on account of my eyes seeing the blue or my brain knowing it to be blue and commanding my eyes accordingly. I don’t know how I could ever know one way or another which phenomenon was actually taking place. In fact, for all I know the sky is red and has been red for many years, making my brain an unmodified liar. Or maybe it is my eyes that are liars. I suppose I cannot trust any of the organs inside me. They could all be deceiving me in one way or another. And what if I am not alone in possessing a deceitful brain? It stands to reason that because brains are all made of relatively the same materials that other people exist out there with lying brains of their own. That would explain why mankind generally believes and agrees that the sky is blue and the sun is yellow and the trees are green, even if they are truly not. It’s a brain-wide conspiracy!

This may be the marijuana talking but I feel like I must test this hypothesis for accuracy. It would really bum me out to discover that there are people out there with honest brains while I sit here with a deceitful one. But that could very well be the case. What if the sky really is red and there are people out there who see it as such? That would annoy me. I would surely come to envy that elite class of brains.

Unable to let the issue rest in my head, I pose the question of the sky’s true color to the room hoping for constructive replies. Ray states that it is blue without even looking up from the bong, a statement that unanimously convinces me that he too could suffer from the same ailment as I, assuming of course the sky is not really blue. Regardless, Ray is operating under the perception that the sky is blue, just like I am. If the sky is in fact not blue, Ray doesn’t see it. He is not elite. Now it is time to get Tyler’s response. If he turns out to be elite, I may have to rethink my whole stance on him. After all, Landon is decidedly not elite; he believes the sky is blue and would accept no other premise as true. Of course the sky may really be blue and in that case this whole tangent is a silly waste of time. I would feel much better if that were the case but I am not so sure anymore.

Tyler confirms the sky is blue as well. He is not elite. Oh well. This all may have been for naught anyway because science has consistently advocated an invariably blue sky from the point of Earth’s inception. Though Earth as a planetary object has changed quite considerably since its inception, it is entirely possible that the color of the atmosphere changed sometime thereafter. That may be the only way to account for the possibility of people’s brains registering colors differently and it may be the only explanation that could prove my theory plausible, not that I have that as an ultimate goal.

Epilogue: I was never able to confirm or reject this theory.  It stands as a rational prospect in the universe of infinite possibilities.