Page 166 - Allah is Known through Reason

ter whether the object externally is coloured or not.
The prominent thinker Berkeley also addressed
this fact:

At the beginning, it was believed that colours, odours,
etc., "really exist", but subsequently such views were
renounced, and it was seen that they only exist in
dependence on our sensations. 30
In conclusion, the reason we see objects
coloured is not because they are coloured or
because they have an independent material exis-
The findings of modern
tence outside ourselves. The truth of the matter is
physics show that the uni-
verse is a collection of per- rather that all the qualities we ascribe to objects
ceptions. The following
are inside us and not in the "external world".
question appears on the
So what remains of the "external world"?
cover of the well-known
American science magazine
New Scientist, which dealt IS THE EXISTENCE OF THE
with this matter in its 30
"EXTERNAL WORLD" INDISPENSABLE?
January 1999 issue: "Beyond
Reality: Is the Universe So far, we have been speaking repeatedly of an
Really a Frolic of Primal "external world" and a world of perceptions formed
Information and Matter Just
in our brains, the latter of which is what we see.
a Mirage?"
However, since we can never actually reach the
"external world", how can we be sure that such a world really exists?
Actually we cannot. Since each object is only a collection of perceptions
and those perceptions exist only in the mind, it is more accurate to say that
the only world that really exists is the world of perceptions. The
only world we know of is the world that exists in our mind: the one that
is designed, recorded, and made vivid there; the one, in short, that is cre-
ated within our mind. This is the only world of which we can be sure.
We can never prove that the perceptions we observe in our brain have
material correlates. Those perceptions could conceivably be coming from
an "artificial" source.
It is possible to observe this. False stimuli can produce an entirely imag-
inary "material world" in our brain. For example, let us imagine a very
developed recording instrument in which all kinds of electrical signals

166 Allah is Known Through Reason