Philosophical Musings: What we see is not what we see.

When I'm academically tired, I tend to become a philosopher *says "philosopher" with a high-class British accent*

I started wondering about reality.

I call myself a realist so why not think about it more?

When you look at pretty purple flowers (because that's when my thoughts came) are you really looking at purple flowers?

I have heard that each person may see colors differently. My purple might not be the same as your purple.

But then, it got me thinking. What if all that we see wasn't actually what it was?

We are all limited to one perception, our own. We can only see through our own eyes and, based on our understanding of the world up until this point in time, only understand things based on what we already know from past experiences. If we see something that we have never seen before, we still understand it to some degree because we connect it to things we already know.

So. What I'm asking here is, what if all the things we thought we knew, weren't actually true? What if everything was not as it seems? (Swan Princess reference).

For example,

a table.

What if this "table" that we call it, wasn't actually a "table"? If the so called "table" could speak, what if he said "I'm not a table." And so as Descartes said in 1641:

(Latin:) hoc pronuntiatum: ego sum, ego existo, quoties a me profertur, vel mente concipitur, necessario esse verum.

(English:) this proposition: I am, I exist, whenever it is uttered from me, or conceived by the mind, necessarily is true.

(Wikipedia: Cogito ergo sum)

If the so called "table" says it is not a "table" then that must be true.

If, if tables could talk.

If...if is good.

We call them tables only because someone long time ago started calling them tables. The thing that stands up and you eat off of or play card games on didn't have a name before but it had an existence. If it knew its existence, it probably did not consider itself as a table.

Okay, that was too deep for you, wasn't it? :P

Let's take it down a notch.

Cats. Everyone likes cats.

Cats probably consider themselves as the cats we humans mean. But I'm pretty sure they do not call themselves "cats". That's just our name for their species. Cats seem to have a language with each other. Do you think they call themselves cats? I'm certain they don't.

So, if cats could talk, they would probably say "We aren't called cats." So, it's not what it seems. What we thought were cats are not cats. What the cats say is true because it is uttered from them as Descartes would say.

I can say I am a human. So that must be true.

Humans have named a LOT of things. It's even in the bible as one of Adam's first thing on his To-Do List. He named the animals. Horse. Peacock. Or whatever. If Eve had any say in it, she probably would have not named that BEAUTIFUL bird a peacock. Poor bird.


Now that we have concluded (sorta) that any name given to any thing ever is by our own human perception and not taking into consideration the truth which may be uttered from the thing that we named, provided they can talk in a way that we understand...

When a cat goes to yowl on the fence, she may actually be saying "I'm not a caaaaat, you fool. Not a caaaaat. What is thaaaaat?"


Now to the grit of this blog post. Let me mess with your brain :)

Back to the purple flower. I see a purple flower. You see a purple flower. A blind person smells a purple flower and feels the petals.

But what if all these senses. Smell, touch, sight, even sound were all deceptions?

We smell a flower but we only know that it is the scent of a flower based on our past experiences. We know what a flower smells like so when we smell it again, we understand that it is a flower.

We see a purple flower. We learned what kind of color "purple" is so we can understand that it is purple. We also learned what a "flower" looks like so we can understand that it is a flower.

We put it together and quickly understand that we are seeing a "purple flower".

BUT

What if those senses were all wrong?

What if we are actually smelling something completely different but because our brains associate those smells with flowers, they MAKE US SEE flowers? What if, actually, there ARE NO FLOWERS?

Even touch. We touch something and that signal travels from our fingertips at lightning speed and reaches our brain and we say "flower petals".

BUT

What if we are actually touching something completely different but because our brains already are programmed to understand what a flower feels like, our fingertips are feeling the "soft flower petals" BEFORE THE IDEA REACHES OUR BRAINS?

What I'm saying is, our brains have been programmed through our past experiences to understand things in a certain way. Our parents teach us what a purple flower looks like just as their parents have taught them and those parents were taught by their own parents and so on.

Our past experiences are stored away in our brains...PERMANENTLY. Nothing can alter it and we cannot get rid of it.

SO

Because we cannot get rid of it, our brains always dig up the information needed when we see the object in front of us. We see it, smell it, and then, at lightning speed, our brains tell us the object in front of us is, indeed, a purple flower.

But, our brains have to, in the extremely short time, put together all the puzzle pieces in order to dig up the correct file and tell us what we are smelling, hearing, touching, seeing.

"Sweet scent, bright color purple, soft to the touch...and that shape...ah, here it is, the purple flower. IT IS THE PURPLE FLOWER!" the brain tells us.

Then we say "pretty purple flower" and everyone smiles.

THAT IS WHAT WE THOUGHT OUR BRAINS WERE DOING.

MIND BLOWN! POOF!

Calm down now, take a deep breath and let me explain.

What if they were actually telling us completely wrong information based on completely wrong or too general hints?

So, here's how I see it.

We look at the scene in front of us and then...

Brain: What is that.

Nose: It smells sweet. But this kind of sweetness. What do you have?

Brain: Sweet scents are from flowers. Past experience says so.

Nose: Oh okay. Then it smells like a sweet flower.

Brain: What color?

Eyes: That dark color.

Brain: Dark, like red. Blue?

Eyes: More blue like.

Brain: Past experiences say it is called purple.

Eyes: Oh okay. Then it is a purple color.

Brain: Touch?

Fingertips: It is nice to touch.

Brain: If it is nice, it must be soft. Past experiences say nice to the touch is soft. Gathering all this information, it is sweet like a flower. Flowers smell sweet from past experiences. It is the color purple. It is soft. Flowers have petals. Petals have GOT TO BE soft. If it is sweet like a flower it must be soft flower petals.


So then the brain tells us it is a purple flower that smells sweet. And, based on past experiences, we like it so it must be pretty.

We say "pretty purple flower". Mind you, all this happens in less than a second.

Imagine, if this is what was actually happening...what does our world REALLY look like?

...

We will never know.

See ya later, alligators...or, are you?

:P

Note: I didn't include "taste" because then it gets way to complicated and I'll need the pros to help me out.