What the Hell Did I Just Read

An Excerpt from Fear: Hell’s Parasite by Dr. Albert Marconi

There used to be a famous thought experiment that went something like this:

A child is born blind. She has in her possession two wooden toys—a ball and a block. After years of playing with both, she knows the contours of each object intimately by touch—the sphere and the cube. Then, late in childhood, she is given surgery to correct her eyesight. Now that she can see for the first time, would this young lady be able to distinguish the block from the ball on sight alone?

I say this “used” to be a thought experiment, because we now know the answer: no. Real subjects who have had their sight restored, upon seeing a cube for the first time, cannot connect it with the eight pointy corners they remember feeling in their hands. They fully expect it to feel like the smooth sphere, until they hold it and learn otherwise.

The lesson? You do not see with your eyes. You see with your brain.

The visual data that enters your optic nerve is meaningless noise without the brain’s ability to overlay meaning upon it. This means, quite simply, that what you see (in a real, not metaphorical, sense) is a result of what you have been built to see, and nothing more. If you would like a comparison, imagine the family dog lying in a room while its masters watch a film on television. Dogs cannot see television (their eyes are quite different from yours) so all they know is that the humans in the room are sitting motionless, staring listlessly at a noisy square object on the wall. The canine may note voices or other familiar sounds from that device, but because those sounds are not accompanied by smells, they do not represent anything of interest to it. Even if the dog could learn to converse with humans, it would be next to impossible to explain to the animal that the motionless, silent people in the room are interacting with other living beings located thousands of miles away, performing actions that actually occurred years earlier. Which is to say, the family and the dog are in the same room, but experiencing very different realities.

The very next day, the family takes that dog for a walk in the park. They are amused at how their pet frantically sniffs patches of grass, enthralled by seemingly nothing at all. They are mystified at its obsession with smelling the anuses of other dogs, yanking on its leash and discouraging it from indulging what they figure must be a curious fetish. How could the dog ever explain that its sense of smell is thousands of times more sensitive than theirs, that it can, in mere seconds, sniff out an entire life-or-death drama that played out in that very patch of empty grass weeks earlier? One whiff told the hound that an animal had recently urinated there, that said animal’s metabolism was failing, and that it was extremely frightened. A sniff of another dog’s posterior spells out its entire biography—its age, success as a hunter, its suitability as a mate and/or likelihood of winning a fight to the death.

Same park. Two different realities.

This is despite the fact that man and canine both evolved in the same environment, with extremely similar biology. Now imagine the difference between two beings who evolved in different worlds entirely.

Knowing my line of work, I suppose you have already guessed why this is relevant to my interests. If a being from another universe were to appear in ours, our ability to understand it would be exactly as limited as the formerly blind teenager trying to identify his or her beloved toys by sight alone. Our brains would paw around madly for some context to make sense of the entity but, finding none, would frantically try to construct a crude analog. Some of us would see demons, some would see aliens, some would see nothing at all.

When those conflicting impressions clash with one another, well, you need only to open a history book to see the result. We will live and die according to how we interpret the unfamiliar. All of human culture is nothing more than that very process, playing out again and again.