Page 249 - For Men of Understanding

signals will reach your brain, and you will lose your sense of taste completely.
Here, we come across another fact: You can never be sure that how a food
tastes to you is the same as how it tastes to anyone else; or that your percep-
tion of a voice is the same as what another's when he hears that same voice.
Along the same lines, science writer Lincoln Barnett wrote that "no one can ever
know whether his sensation of red or of Middle C is the same as another man's." 3
Our sense of touch is no different. When we handle an object, all the infor-
mation that helps us recognise it is transmitted to the brain by sensitive nerves
on the skin. The feeling of touch is formed in our brain. Contrary to conven-
tional wisdom, we perceive sensations of touch not at our fingertips or on our
skin, but in our brain's tactile centre. As a result of the brain's assessment of
electrical stimulations coming to it from the skin, we feel different sensations
pertaining to objects, such as hardness or softness, heat or cold. From these
stimulations, we derive all details that help us recognise an object. Concerning
this important fact, consider the thoughts of B. Russell and L. J. J. Wittgenstein,
two famous philosophers:
For instance, whether a lemon truly exists or not and how it came to exist
cannot be questioned and investigated. A lemon consists merely of a taste
sensed by the tongue, an odor sensed by the nose, a color and shape
sensed by the eye; and only these features of it can be subject to examina-
tion and assessment. Science can never know the physical world. 4
It is impossible for us to reach the physical world outside our brain. All
objects we're in contact with are actually collection of perceptions such as
sight, hearing, and touch. Throughout our lives, by processing the data in the
sensory centres, our brain confronts not the "originals" of the matter existing
outside us, but rather copies formed inside our brain. At this point, we are mis-
led to assume that these copies are instances of real matter outside us.

The "External World" Inside Our Brain
As a result of these physical facts, we come to the following indisputable
conclusion: Everything we see, touch, hear, and perceive as "matter," "the
world" or "the universe" is in fact electrical signals interpreted in our brain. We
can never reach the original of the matter outside our brain. We merely taste,
hear and see an image of the external world formed in our brain. In fact, some-

one eating an apple confronts not the actual fruit, but its perceptions in the
brain. What that person considers to be an apple actually consists of his brain's
perception of the electrical information concerning the fruit's shape, taste,
smell, and texture. If the optic nerve to the brain were suddenly severed, the
image of the fruit would instantly disappear. Any disconnection in the olfacto-

Matter and the External World 247