What's Really Out There?

(I am going to be mis-using the word 'self' on purpose for effect below.)

Your self is automatically removed from everything else by the nature of its existence. Because it is separate from everything it encounters, all information coming its way is a translation of the original--the medium of transmission necessarily alters the information being carried. The receiving self’s decoding methods will also necessarily alter the original independent of the transmission medium. You do not have a tree inside your brain through the act of seeing or touching one. You do not recreate a strip of bacon in your head when smelling one being cooked.

We can accurately say that everything is perception because even if there is a ‘real’ thing out there somewhere triggering our perception tools to fire and notice, our medium of existence does not have the ability to experience it or its effects directly--you can’t become or join something else in order to experience it as it is. You can’t integrate your self into a rock or become a tornado. You can’t even be sure that you see the same colors that I do, even when looking at the same source at the same time.

Sometimes we assign a label to a purely perceived object trying to make it real. Money is the perfect example. Its only value is whatever we all agree it is. It wouldn’t exist without humans around to give it value through our perception of it. I’m not addressing the bills or coins themselves. I’m addressing their meaning and value to our self--it is what we perceive it to be.

Similarly, think of Lagrange points. These are points out in space between bodies (stars, planets, moons) around which an object can orbit, just as if there was a ‘real’ body there. We have satellites out there right now orbiting nothing. The forces that keep an object there are a combination of the gravitational fields of nearby objects, making it seem like something is there, too. But there is nothing there.

If there is a ‘real’ object behind something our self perceives, then we can’t ever know what it is with certainty. Our attempts to find out can only produce a paraphrase of the original, an altered and inaccurate version of it. How do we know what it is we are perceiving is not the equivalent of a Lagrange point? We can’t.

Islam requires its followers to read the Qur’an in Arabic. They see the translation into other languages the same as an “explanation” of the original, a form of commentary. It’s not the original and can’t be understood as intended unless read in Arabic.

Even this attempt at conveying these points is not going to be perceived in the way I intend. I can’t even read this myself and get back the same information I started with. It is a second generation copy, degraded by the process.

So, everything may not be perception alone, but that’s all we get to work with. We can’t take off the glasses because without them we get nothing at all. We’ve got no choice but to live in a soup of personal existence (at least) once removed from all else, never knowing everything else as it really is, or if something’s even there at all.