Often I have found myself thinking, contemplating about reality. Or, at the least, what it is that I perceive as reality. Am I really here? Is this real? Is what I'm touching now real? What is this that I am seeing, hearing, tasting, sensing now? What is the real? Is what I am perceiving real? Do people sense and process the world around them the same way as I do? Is what I perceive as reality also the same reality that other people sense?
More than once I try to answer these questions. More than once, I find myself at a dead end. After all, I am myself. I can never be anyone else other than myself. And, in that sense, I can never truly know how other people perceive the world. I cannot feel what they feel when they touch something. I cannot sense what they sense when they smell something. I cannot see what they see when they are looking at something. Even when I ask them how something feels or tastes or seems, my brain still has to process their answers. What they want to say through the words they speak may not be interpreted correctly, in accordance to them, by my brain. Additionally, what I am getting is secondhand information. When my brain has to interpret an answer, I have to imagine what that answer means drawing clues from my own bank of experiences and knowledge. My imagination could easily be 100% off tangent.
Evidently, the reality that the other perceives can never truly be known to me. I will never know if the reality I perceive is the reality that others perceive. People may say that it should be the same because one can read it in a book the same way. But how one processes the information in the book may be different from how another will process it. I say "may" because I cannot truly know. There is a similarity in how we may think, see, taste, hear, and feel. Just as how you are able to read this log right now. Or how you are able to watch the shows aired on cable just as a billion other people can. However, there is a fundamental difference in the realities we perceive. And that fundamental difference is that we are not one all-encompassing, omnipotent, omnipresent being. WE are separate in body, thought and deed. Our own language speaks of such separation between the "I" and the "you" and the "s/he". We acknowledge our separation by calling the self the "I" and the other as "you" or "s/he". A separation which, I believe, can never truly be bridged unless the human race starts working as a hive mind.
In the end, all that I can truly know is the reality I perceive, touch, feel, sense. Beyond that is no more than a void to me; a blackness I cannot penetrate not because I have no desire to, but because I simply cannot. I cannot because I am myself. I cannot because I am not you. I cannot because I am not the other. I cannot know your reality just as you cannot know mine.
an interesting question has been raised here, and it has been raised by many others.
ReplyDeleteIs there any objective evidence that our perception is valid ?
No.Does it mean that we may be hosts to a huge monopolized reality-illusion and there would be no way to realize that ? Yes.
The question I ask is however more significant question.Do the answers to the above questions change the quality of our experience ? I dont think so. I believe that reality is shaped by perception and not the reverse. Reality that cannot be percieved or deduced doesnt matter.*
So we are in a sense,each of us is like Brahma realizing reality be merely percieving it**.
*since a phenomena which cannot be deduced, cannot be measured, doesnt have a appreciable effect on the universe, thus making it irrelevant.
**Quantum Mech talks in a similar note, saying that the act of observation causes the probabality function to 'collapse' that is become determinate.Ex the Schrodinger's cat.