"One of the great revelations of space exploration
is the image of the earth, finite and lonely
bearing the entire human species
through the oceans of space and time."

-Carl Sagan

The Mind that Perceives Itself

I have spent much of a weekend in splendid isolation, inside my beautiful apartment and the confines of my own mind. I cannot understand those who must always have people around them... how will they know themselves? I relish my time in solitude, so long as it is interspersed with human interaction and will inevitably end at some point. But my point is that we are constantly bombarded with stimulation from the outside world, and when do we have time to process it? My brain must work rather slowly, because I am easily overwhelmed if not afforded sufficient time to think about something that has happened, and its implications. How else could one learn?

At any rate, I sit here in solitude and wonder. Do I exist? Things only exist as people perceive them in their minds, and if there is no one here to perceive me, then well... what am I? I suppose I could be anything, I must just wait for someone to perceive me and tell me what that is. Or even if I'm here at all. One might argue that I am perceiving myself, but I would be doing this with my own perceiving device-- my mind. And let's not define a thing based only on itself. Could I really say, My mind exists because I perceive it with my mind? Such an argument would not be credible.

Which brings me to the point of schizophrenia: Are people who speak, apparently to themselves, but are responding to "voices" in their heads- are they the product of isolation? Of having no one there to validate them of their existence? Must they have someone, something with which to interact in order to prove that they're the person they think they are? Perhaps their minds are just trying to perceive themselves.