MaximizedAction wrote...
TheConstantOne wrote...
Notice that Hackett refers to the Citadel boarding party with singular words. By his accounts only one person got to the Citadel.
Now I am of the belief that Shepard is actually on the Citadel after being hit by Harbinger's beam, but this dialogue indicates that Shepard is the only person (from the Alliance) to get that far. So if Anderson is an illusion and TIM is interacting with it, we can thus conclude that TIM is also a hallucination.
That conclusion only works if two real individuals cannot share a hallucination. Any source or counter-example for why that is impossible?
Sure, I could give a counter argument. I'll have to argue it statistically and from the point of view of someone who isn't a neurologist.
First consider that a hallucination could be described as an alteration in one's perception of reality. Reality here being defined as the average response by a living creature to external stimuli. The deviations from this average would be pretty small, like some people see dark purple where someone else sees a dark blue color.
Now since a hallucination is a twist in perception, we can imagine that it is a remarkable deviation from the average of reality. Remarkable being such that an individual is hearing sounds or seeing images without any corresponding external stimuli triggering these reactions. Given that such extreme deviations would only be noticed by a particular mental state, and the more sophisticated the hallucination becomes, the more particular a mental state would have to be. In order for more than one person to share a hallucination, they would have to have excessively similar brain chemistry for an extended period of time. This is statistically very unlikely and so I would claim that hallucinations are unique to an individual. However, to others who suffer from hallucinations, suggestions could be planted to give many people a similar hallucination. Like how a crowd of people watching a horror flick may be more susceptible to unexpected noises.
Now, to comment on the brain chemistry thing, Reaper indoctrination works by altering brain chemisty. Reapers could make it possible for people to share illusions. But I find it hard to believe that the Reapers would go so far as to waste a resource by making him "pick up" an imaginary gun from an imaginary Anderson. It would seem like a remarkable waste of resources since the Reapers already have Shepard in a weakened state. Better to keep him on hand and kill Shepard should Shepard begin to use the control console for the correct purpose and leave the convincing to Reaper mind games.
In short, while I can't point to something that says two people can't have the same hallucination, I deem it impossible due to statistical odds (which I won't calculate...if you want to figure out how exactly trillions of synapeses can connect to each other and the liklihood of the relevant synapses linking up in the same way, be my guest
). In this situation, even with indoctrination which *would* make sharded hallucinations possible, I believe the Reapers would keep and indoc'ed TIM for a more useful purpose and not throw him away so needlessly
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