PERCEPTION IS REALITY....WRONG....PERCEPTION CREATES REALITY

When you give a red rose to your beloved on Valentine's Day, you have every right to say, "I made this for you." All the qualities that a rose possesses -- its velvety texture, its lush red color, even its thorns -- are real to us because our perception makes them real. Photons of light have no color, only frequencies and wavelengths. The point of a thorn has no sharpness. The scent of a rose isn't sweet when seen merely as airborne molecules. The reality of these specific qualities is tied to us. The brain processes electrochemical signals sent from photoreceptors in the eye to "create" the color red. Skin-encapsulated mechanosensory receptors send electrochemical signals that reassure us of a solid "material" world, but the prick of a thorn is created by our brain. Indeed we now know that the brain takes into account a number of factors to choose how much pain to create; varying any one of these factors can affect how prickly the same thorn is.

There is no provable link between "this is what I see" and "this is real." With a different brain comes a shift of perception, and everything about a rose would change. Roses exist in the world of snails that chew the leaves, aphids that suck the sap, moths that lay eggs in hidden crevices and cats that lurk underneath to wait for a bird to alight. But what these organisms experience is certainly not the rose for Valentine's Day. As humans we have no conceivable way of entering the perceptual world of those creatures. We can only imagine a link, and then we take our imagined similarities for granted.