with reference to part 7

mj are u attending my psychology lectures secretely??! the most interesting thing that ive learnt and actually understood from my psych lectures for the past 2 weeks is this argument on what we consider the world to be. "question your reality" that's what the psych lecturer said. basically there are 2 extremes on how we might conceive as the world. the first is illustrated by plato as there being a 'real world' but our mortal senses are only capable of sampling a small subsection of that world. And the second given by Neitszche that there being no 'real world', only the world inside your head contructed from what you think you see. How do you know what you see is what it actually is? Take for example, the colour blue. The reason why you call that colour blue is because somebody once pointed at it and told you that that is blue. But how do you know that what you are seeing is actually blue. What you are seeing could be completely different from what someone else sees. You could be seeing it as pink but because someone told you that pink is blue so you think that pink is blue and what you think is pink is not actually pink when u see it but what someone else would consider blue or green or yellow. The same for hearing. The voice of someone that you hear could sound completely different to what someone else hears. Isnt that a freaky thought? =D haha.. i was a bit freaked by that. So, the relevance of this post to part 7 is the question of how reliable your constructed world is when that world is completely made up by you. another quote from lecturer, "the visual world becomes something very different the moment a photon becomes a receptor output. That electromagnetic data that comes in to the eye becomes maximally fragmented in space and time and the task facing the visual system is to put that back together in a useful and meaningful way. As long as this is beneficial to the organism, the system can make up its own rules." The background to this is that the eye does not work like a camera, contrary to what youve learnt in the textbooks. ie, you dont get an upside down image in your brain that your brain flips around. theres this whole concept of a receptive field which explains how images get transmitted and relayed and its like you've got millions of fragments inside ur eye and that has to be reconstructed to form what you see. dont ask me more about these receptive fields im completely lost as to how it really works =P but yea.. so there you go, less matrix and more real life relevant/slightly philosphical. cheers! =D