Monday, 2 September 2019

The Truth is Out There.

'Have you ever had a hallucination?' asks the psychiatrist.

How can you answer that? It’s in the nature of a hallucination that it appears unequivocally real, so for all you know the psychiatrist himself might be a hallucination, and what he’s saying might be words your mind has put into his unreal mouth. How can you know what’s a hallucination and what isn’t? Come to that, your whole life might be one long hallucination. There are those who claim it is.

So if the psychiatrist says 'that strange experience you had was certainly a hallucination', how can you trust him? You can’t even trust him if he says 'in my opinion you’re completely sane.' It might just be that you’re creating a phantasm in order to hear what you want to hear.

That’s why I tend towards circumspection in all things, even when it comes to the question of whether there is any such thing as a hallucination.

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Incidentally, I didn’t find any loopholes in tonight’s episode of X Files because I hadn’t a clue what was going on. And now I’m listening to the LSO playing Nimrod (in Japan.)

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