HOW MUCH OF REALITY HAVE YOU EXPERIENCED?

Roughly I divide the real world into myself and the external world.  I have seen x-rays of my chest, counted my pulse, consciously know I am breathing, chewing, swallowing, walking, and nodding off to sleep.  I am aware of the input of food and the output of my excreta.  I have seen my blood, bruising, hair distribution, pores, and the contours of my limbs and body.  I know what I look like mostly from seeing my face and body in the mirror.  Of my 20 trillion cells I have only seen a few hundred of my red and white blood cells from a slide I prepared from a drop of my blood at NYU when I was an undergraduate and learned how to stain, prepare a slide, and look at my blood cells under the microscope. I have not seen any of my other cells.  I saw my chromosomes when they were prepared by Nedra’s cytogenetics laboratory and they are mounted as a photo (with Nedra’s chromosomes facing them on a framed snapshot diptych portrait). I got to look into my lower intestine while having a lower colonoscopy at Stony Brook University and the MD allowed me to look at my inside, the intestine resembling a cave with its farther entrance like a black olive. I saw an NMR of my brain after I fell down stairs in 2008 at my home on Mud Road in Setauket NY and wanted to rule out a tumor as the cause of my falling. My senses, now somewhat impaired with age, made me aware of sounds, experience visual colored views of the external world, aware of pressure and pain, aware of tactile pleasure, and aware of a large variety of tastes.  I know my teeth, tongue, lips, oral cavity.  I am aware of my kidneys and ureters from the passage of kidney stones about a half dozen times in my life.  I am aware of my duodenum from once having an ulcer when I was at UCLA.  I can feel my heart beating when I place my hand on my chest.  Much of my internal anatomy I infer from the many dissections I did in comparative anatomy courses that I either took or visited as a teaching assistant at Indiana University and got to see 90 or more specimens of fetal pigs, cats, frogs, salamanders (mud puppies) or dogfish sharks. 

Of the external world, the portion I have seen is laughably small.  There are 100 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and the sun is most familiar to me.  There are hundreds of stars I can discern at night through their association with an earth-based perspective that we call constellations.  There are thousands more that are like pinpoints in a black cloth at night. I  have seen more galaxies and stars as pictures in books than I have seen through a telescope. I am aware that other than the sun, all the other stars I see are light years away from me, the galaxies hundreds of thousands to billions of light years from me.  This means through telescope or printed photos, the celestial reality I see is an illusion because where those objects have moved as stars or galaxies is probably different than this light that was emitted so many light years ago. The very small is also largely hidden from me.  I do not see individual atoms.  Some molecules can form crystals and I can see the relation between the atoms that compose them and the shape that crystals take.  As a geneticist I have seen photos of DNA revealed by x-ray diffraction studies.  I have seen gene sequences revealed by gels that have a bar code like distribution that makes them readable to biochemists.  I have looked at the region of the second chromosome of fruit flies that bore the dumpy gene whose physical structure I helped analyze.  I have induced mutations in that gene.  On an earthly scale, I have flown around the world once and sailed (on a cruise liner) twice around the world while teaching at Semester at Sea.  I have been in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America and have seen the North pole through an airplane window.  I am almost 84 years old so I have experienced four generations of human life.  I have fathered six children, have 12 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.  I have been married twice. The oldest person I have met whose time on earth overlapped mine was born about 1850.  He was a 100 year old Hoosier and visiting his son who worked as a lawyer at 217 Broadway in Manhattan where I was a 19 year old elevator operator.