Reality Crowd

Every morning I wake up, and I still feel like me. My conscious experience feels stable, natural, consistent, and singular (me). However, as Jill Bolte Taylor, our speaker and brain scientist describes, the two halves of our brains have distinctly separate experiences. They function very differently from one another and care about different things entirely. Having a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain and having left-brain functions individually shut down gave to her unique insight to her mind. She describes in vivid detail how her unaffected right hemisphere became more and more responsible for her entire conscious experience as her left-brain failed. She describes a profound awakening experience as she came to know pure right-brain thought and the hemisphere’s personal experience. She gives insights to the mind on a scientific level and even reaches into—dare I say—a spiritual realm offering her own words of hope for the experience of the human race.

Now for the fun part! Test your own hemispheres with this optical illusion.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

~How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later

“So we and our elaborately evolving computers may meet each other halfway. Someday a human being, named perhaps Fred White, may shoot a robot named Pete Something-or-other, which has come out of a General Electric factory, and to his surprise see it weep and bleed. And the dying robot may shoot back and, to its surprise, see a wisp of gray smoke arise from the electric pump that it supposed was Mr. White’s beating heart. It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them.”

~ The Shifting Realities of Phillip K. Dick

Sometimes reality is hard to define. At Reality Crowd we look at the issue from all sorts of perspectives and angles. Sometimes we have to break out quantum mechanics or theology to make a point. But what hope do we really have of defining reality if we can’t even agree on what an ad is telling us to do? This ad from Checkers is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. What am I supposed to purchase? What do I get when I purchase it? I have read over this many times and I can’t for the life of me figure it out. Posters on this photo’s Flickr page have been trying to discern it’s mystery as well and it’s not going too well. Here are some choice selections:

i would say that the “2 for” deal is a two for one deal and thus i think the add really means. buy two sandwiches for the price of one and get a third item for free…
i think

“So essentially you get two double deals, and 1 double value for the price of 1 double deal.” So, that’s five sandwiches for the price of two, correct? Except that one of them (”value”) is smaller?

So if I order the “2 for $3 Double Cheeseburger Deal”….I get a FREE SINGLE DEAL, which is what, a single cheeseburger? No, can’t be, because it’s from the DOUBLE VALUE menu, which I assume only has things like Double Cheeseburgers. But then is one double cheeseburger a “SINGLE DEAL”?

The debate rages on several different websites…for some choice comments (and a few good laughs) check out the Flickr page, the post on boing boing, and the post on Without Warning for more.

So what do you think? As a lover of reality how do you explain this?