Page 70 - The Evil Called Mockery

68 THE EVIL CALLED MOCKERY

The World of Electrical Signals
All the information we have about the world is conveyed to us
by our five senses. Thus, the world we know consists of what our
eyes see, our hands feel, our nose smells, our tongue tastes, and our
ears hear. Many people never think that the external world can be
other than what our senses present to us, since we've depended on
those senses since the day we were born.
Yet modern research in many different fields of science points
to a very different understanding, leading to serious doubt about
the "outside" world that we perceive with our senses.
For this new understanding, the starting point is that every-
thing we perceive as external is only a response formed by electrical
signals in our brain. The information one has about the red of an
apple, the hardness of wood—moreover, one's mother, father, fam-
ily, and everything that one owns, one's house, job, and even the
pages of this book—is comprised of electrical signals only. In other
words, we can never know the true color of the apple in the outside
world, nor the true structure of wood there, nor the real appearance
of our parents and the ones we love. They all exist in the outside
world as Allah's creations, but we can only have direct experience of
the copies in our brains for so long as we live.
To clarify, let's consider the five senses which provide us with
all our information about the external world.

How Do We See, Hear, and Taste?
The act of seeing occurs in a progressive fashion. Light (pho-
tons) traveling from the object passes through the lens in front of the
eye, where the image is refracted and falls, upside down, onto the
retina at the back of the eye. Here, visual stimuli are turned into
electrical signals, in turn transmitted by neurons to a tiny spot in the