What exactly is reality? Think about it. Look around you. If you are blessed with the gift of normal vision, you can perceive all sorts of colors and shapes around you. You can appreciate beauty. You can navigate around obstacles. You can do simple things like picking up a crisp, red apple from a granite countertop and bite into it – knowing it is wholesome and good. That apple is as real as it gets. Or is it?

The human eye can perceive light across a wide sampling of colors, termed the visible spectrum. We can differentiate among hundreds of different levels of hue, intensity, and saturation. Yep. We can see it all. Or can we?

Hugh: “Check out that rainbow, Violet. Isn’t it beautiful?”
Violet: “It sure is. Look at all the colors. Amazing.”
Hugh: “I wonder what that rainbow would look like if you were a dog.”
Violet: “Huh? A dog? Dogs are color-blind, right?”
Hugh: “No. Dogs see colors, but they can’t see as many colors as humans, so their rainbow would have fewer stripes. Of course, if you were a mantis shrimp …”
Violet: “A what?”
Hugh: “A mantis shrimp. Their eyes have twelve, count ‘em, twelve types of color receptors. Humans only have three – red, green, and blue. We put every color we can see together using only those three. Dogs only have two. Butterflies see more colors than us. They have five types of receptors. The mantis shrimp, however, is the king. They can see countless colors we can’t even imagine.”
Violet: “Must be fun to go with them to the paint store. I can’t even tell the difference between ‘Ascension Aqua’ and ‘Tonal Teal’. Imagine if there were tons more shades in between!”

Violet’s paint store comment represents only a sliver of the whole sensory story around what reality really is. The entire light spectrum is huge – far more vast than puny human eyes can see. If we could see it all, we wouldn’t even recognize the world around us. It would be a jumble of wild and swirling lights made of countless colors. Our brains would be overwhelmed.

And – the brain is where it all really happens anyway. Everything we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell gets formulated and presented to our consciousness inside our brain. Everything. That brings a couple of oddly disturbing thoughts to mind.

Here’s one.

Smells do not exist. That’s right. A smell is not really anything until a nose (human or otherwise) processes the chemical properties of some sort of gas and converts those properties to electrochemical signals that an attached brain interprets. Only the brain knows what a smell actually is. In the absence of a nose and associated brain, it simply does not exist.

Sounds do not exist. Think about it. Sounds get manufactured inside your brain. Outside of your ear, they are merely vibrations traveling through the air. The vibrations strike your eardrum, causing tiny bones and hair-like structures in your middle and inner ear to also vibrate. Eventually, these vibrations get interpreted as signals along nerve pathways into the brain. Once they arrive, the brain sorts the signals out and converts the data to what you perceive as sound – but the sound itself isn’t really a “thing.” It doesn’t exist.

The same goes for taste and tactile sensations. Nothing is real except what is perceived as real in the recesses of your consciousness. That’s hard to swallow, but it’s absolutely true. This means that we all could exist simply as brains in jars on a shelf somewhere, getting everything we perceive as reality through wires delivering raw, specific data for processing. We would never, ever know the difference. We would have no way to tell because … nothing is real.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books. His second novel, The "Bit Dance" is a cautionary tale about what can happen when technology runs away from its creators. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location: https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_s…
His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/

Brain photo by Gaetan Lee. Used under Creative Commons License.