Page 163 - Allah is Known through Reason

what we experience when we taste a food and what another person expe-
riences when he tastes the same food, or what we perceive when we hear
a voice and what another person perceives when he hears the same voice
are the same. Lincoln Barnett says that no one can know whether another
person perceives the colour red or hears the C note the in same way as

does he himself. 28
Our sense of touch is no different from the others. When we touch an
object, all information that will help us recognise the external world and
objects are transmitted to the brain by the sense nerves on the skin. The
feeling of touch is formed in our brain. Contrary to general belief, the place
where we perceive the sense of touch is not at our finger-tips or on our
skins but at the centre of touch perception in our brains. Because of the
brain's interpretation of electrical stimuli coming to it from objects, we
experience those objects differently such as that they are hard or soft, hot
or cold. We derive all the details that help us recognise an object from
these stimuli. Concerning this, the thoughts of two famous philosophers,
B. Russell and L. Wittgenstein, are as follows:
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 odour sensed by the nose, a colour 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. 29

It is impossible for us to reach the physical world. All objects around us
are a collection of perceptions such as seeing, hearing, and touching. By
processing the data in the centre of vision and in other sensory centres,
our brains, throughout our lives, do not confront the "original" of the
matter existing outside us but rather the copy formed inside our
brain. It is at this point that we are misled by assuming these copies are
instances of real matter outside us.

"THE EXTERNAL WORLD" INSIDE OUR BRAIN
From the physical facts described so far, we may conclude the follow-
ing. Everything we see, touch, hear, and perceive as "matter", "the world"
or "the universe" is only electrical signals occurring in our brain.

A Very Different Approach to Matter 163