Page 146 - The Truth of the Life of This World

late or a fruit that you like is your brain's interpretation of electrical signals.
You can never reach the object outside; you can never see, smell or taste
the chocolate itself. For instance, if the nerves between your tongue and
your brain are cut, no further 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
perception 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." 16
Our sense of touch is no different. When we handle an object, all the
information that helps us recognise it is transmitted to the brain by sensi-
tive nerves on the skin. The feeling of touch is formed in our brain.
Contrary to conventional 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 examination and
assessment. Science can never know the physical world. 17

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 mat-
ter existing outside us, but rather copies formed inside our brain. At
this point, we are misled to assume that these copies are instances of real
matter outside us.

144 The Secret Beyond Matter