It is natural to think that the world exists as we perceive it. This perspective, called naive realism, seems to be the default of the human mind. But, if you take science to its logical conclusion, you will realize that naive realism is false, and obviously so. The evolved psychological structure of our mind has made naive realism very difficult to shake, and thus, despite what science implicates, few people realize what perception actually is: a suite of elegant and useful devices of the mind that convert parts of the vastly complex physical universe into mental representations that evolved because of their adaptive consequences. I will attempt to show you what I mean.
Let's start with an analysis of one the major senses, hearing. The interaction of matter produces vibrations that travel through the air. If the vibrations are between a certain frequency, then they physically cause some kind of oscillation in the inner ear. Information from these oscillations is sent to the auditory cortex of the brain, where they are interpreted and the sensation of sound is produced. So, sound waves exist, but noise does not. Noise is a construct of the mind, produced by complex networks of brain neurons firing in patterns. Sound waves are named relative to the sense they create in humans, and indeed in most mammals. But these vibrations do not carry sound. Sound comes from us. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it does not make a sound. It makes vibrations. We evolved a mechanism to harness the vibrations (the ear) and a mechanism to make sense of the vibrations (the brain) because it is useful. With the right mental tools, sound waves can communicate how matter is interacting, at what intensity, from how far away, and in what direction.
It is commonly said that bats use sound to navigate. They do use what we call sound waves to navigate, but it is important to realize that they do not "hear" their way around. They probably use sound waves to recreate their external spatial environment in their mind's eye. In this way, echolocation is much more akin to sight. Humans and bats use the same phenomena for different means. Our senses reveal the world in some way, yes, but what exists externally is not absolute.
Taste does not exist either. Chemicals exist, and we evolved what we call taste to help put beneficial things into our body and to keep deleterious things out. And if you think about it, it is also misconception that we have five senses. We have lots more, and in fact, categorizing our senses may come more from utility and intuition than from necessity. I'm not sure we need to categorize senses to describe perception. Take touch for example. People have lumped a bunch of discrete processes together because many sense perceptors reside in the same place, the skin or under the skin. But temperature detection, propioception, texture detection, and pressure detection come from separate neurological wirings.
In some ways, we can describe the world objectively. We can talk about heat, energy, chemical structure, mass, vibrations, electromagnetism and other aspects from the minutia of the world with truth and accuracy, at least according the scales that we define them. But color, texture, taste, sound, warm/cold, and other perceptions can not be described objectively because they do not exist externally. They only exist in the mind of the perceiver. This for sure is a hard thing to grasp. I am suggesting the universe has no true form. It has form, but it exists on many levels and in many dimensions, and no mind or machine, not even theoretically, could perceive it. Perception is inherently a vehicle of representation or translation, but never of truth.
As I sit in this chair I take note of its apparent characteristics: its color, its texture, its opacity, and its firmness. But the chair is not yellow, it just reflects electromagnetic radiation of specific wavelength. It feels rough, but this has mostly to do with the level at which I perceive it. I feel the threads against each other, not the surface of an individual thread, and I certainly do not feel the molecules themselves. And I see it as solid, but really, most of matter is just empty space. It seems that we perceive chemical interaction in a very removed way. It is not right or wrong that the chair feels rough, or that it looks yellow, it is just a way to frame it, a way that our mind adapted to frame it. I can say however, that the chair has mass, although I have trouble pinpointing exactly why.
It seems obvious to me that since everything is filtered by our senses, we cannot perceive the world as it is. I used to make of this that our senses were a little off, but I now I realize that senses could be completely radical. Perception is something organisms adapted to help them survive and and reproduce by using very few and very specific aspects of the physical universe. This means that perception does not have to be true, just that it has to be useful. Our senses correspond with real details of the world, but the correspondence is strange and made up. I must also add, that there are probably many things in the buzzing, vibrating, physical world that we do not have a sense for at all. Some senses use a specific part of a phenomenon, like sight, in which a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum is recruited for vision. We can't see the other sides of the electromagnetic spectrum, but we can see some effects (sun burn) and we can use tools to convert other wavelengths into a something we can see (spectroscopes do this I think). Question: Are there things out there that we not only do not have a sense for, but also could not design a machine to measure? Would we ever know of such a thing? Is antimatter an example of this? If we can't know all the pieces from the physical world, can we ever disprove reductionist theory?
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"When any answer is possible all answers are meaningless" --Isaac Asimov
"Pour me a drink so I can refuse to toast" --Lorie Moore
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