Jonah Bossewitch	November 21, 1995

PSY 365	Professor Sugarman

Ordinary Mental Life

Even Freud would have to agree that throughout life your most trustworthy companion is yourself. Even taking into account hallucinations, repressions, self-deceptions and all the rest, our senses are still the most reliable source of information we know of. This is not to suggest that we are all a bunch of paranoid skeptics who don't believe a word that anybody else says (we wouldn't be able to function very well in society under that assumption). But at the same time "Seeing is believing" as the saying goes, so we should not be completely surprised that most people have some reaction whenever their senses confirm one of their preexisting beliefs.

This makes me wonder what people actually mean when they say "so it really does exist!" There are probably a multitude of emotions behind such a statement, as such occasions are usually happy, exciting, and long anticipated moments. However , the primary impetus for such remark may lie in the discrepancy between the imagined object and the actual object. There is no way, even in the age of virtual reality, that an accurate mental representation can be formed of an object without actually perceiving it in person. Perhaps one of the thoughts running through the subjects mind is "so this is what this really looks like". If the subjects mental representation of the object was actually very close to the actual object it might startle the subject and make him realize that the object does not only exist in his imagination (as he first encountered it) but also in the external world. Support of this hypothesis lies in the fact that people do not seem to make such remarks about objects that they have not heard much about. A more complete theory would require a fuller set of data.