Do our senses tell us lies?

Parmenides, who lived around 540BC, did not trust his senses.
He did not believe that things in the world around him were really what they looked, or felt, or tasted like.
He thought long and hard about how we could really find out about what was in the outside world.
After all - you might have seen a ghost - lots of people have - but does that mean there was really one there?
You may hear someone shouting your name - you turn round and find your hearing has let you down - they'd been shouting to someone else.
Parmenides decided that you had to trust REASON, not your senses. The Ancient Greek philosophers had a word for reason. It was LOGOS. Some of them thought that LOGOS guided the whole world.
Parmenides was the first rationalist (rash-on-a-list) philosopher. This is someone who thinks you can use pure thought, or reason, to work out how things really are. If it doesn't fit with what you see - then what you see is wrong!
He tried to prove that change is impossible - things only look as though they change. He said that if you can think of something that will exist in the future, or has existed in the past, then it also exists in your mind now. So coming into being and passing away are illusions - really everything is changeless and eternal.
But what is the difference between existing in the world and existing in the mind? Think of a dragon. Does you thinking about it make it exist now, in the past, or in the future? Parmenides thought it did, in a way, because 'Nothingness is not possible' and 'For it is the same thing to think and to be.'
This may sound a bit woolly now but fair play to Parmenides - he set western philosophy lots of questions about existence, and change, and logic which have been debated ever since.
What do you think? If you think something, do you make it 'be'? Do you believe in the evidence of your senses? Are the past, present and future really all one?
Great ideas you set for us Parmenides.
Much much later - in the 17th century- the French philosopher Descartes became famous for saying 'I think therefore I am'. He was another rationalist philosopher who said that we should not believe in what our senses tell us - we could all be the victims of a great lie by an 'evil genius' and nothing might be as it seemed. The only thing I can really know to be 'real' is my own thought that I am having at this moment. And as I am thinking a thought, I must exist. I think Descartes was influenced just a little bit by Parmenides here!
Can you think of any science fiction films that have Parmenidean type themes? That the world around us is not what we think it is? That we are being tricked? There's a lot of philosophy in science fiction.