Justin's Blog

It is widely accepted that all humans know about the world around us is derived from our sensory input. From that input, we then process this sense data and form a perception of the world.

It is important to note that this perception we have is no more than an interpretation of that data, and that these interpretations do not exist innately in the world outside our perceptions. For example, electromagnetic waves (light) of a certain frequency hit our eyes, and from that frequency, our brain interprets a color. That color does not exist innately in the surrounding world; it exists in our perception. Furthermore, our perception takes this barrage of constant data and processes it to form a coherent picture with distinct objects and order. These are also merely interpretations of our surrounding world. The entire visual domain through which we perceive the world is a mere interpretation of light. All that exists outside of our visual perception are these electromagnetic waves, which need not exist in the manner that we perceive them. It is relevant to note that without our ability to perceive these electromagnetic waves, we would not even be aware of this visual realm. We would be completely ignorant of the fact that the world can be perceived through this medium. We would completely fail to gain all the relevant information about the material world that we get from our vision.

This leads us to an interesting question. Could there be more going on in the material world than we are able to perceive?

I see no reason why this would not be the case. It seems that our ability to perceive the sense data that we do is bred out of the early stages of evolution. We started as single-cell organisms that likely failed to interpret light, sound, smell, touch, and taste. At the least, they would certainly fail to interpret these things in the intelligent manner in which we humans interpret them. It seems that these cells evolved gradually into more and more complex life forms. That could gradually perceive these things with better and clearer interpretations.

From an evolutionary perspective, the emergent property of being able to better perceive these phenomena was necessary. The information about the material world that accompany these phenomena, provide a better understanding of the material world for the organism perceiving them. This helps the organism navigate through the material world and ensure a better chance of survival and continuity.

Furthermore, it is relevant to note the laws of physics that ensure that these organisms, and the cells they are comprised of, have a physical reaction to these phenomena. This physical reaction in the cells, causes a chain reaction of signals being passed to the central processing system (the brain). From this, organisms can then start to organize in a manner such that they could interpret these outside material phenomena. But this is obviously only made possible by the fact that these phenomena have physical affect on the organism/cells.

This leaves some key questions.

Firstly, would it be necessary for humans to be able to perceive and interpret all outside material phenomena that have a physical effect on them? Alternatively is it possible that there are things physically impacting the body that humans can’t percieve? This may be equivalent to when light would hit our predecessor single cell organisms, that may not have been capable of perceiving this.

Secondly, is it possible that there are outside material phenomena that do not have a physical effect on humans (that by extension, they cannot perceive)? This would mean that there is an entire realm of physical phenomena occuring that we are completely unable to comprehend, but nonetheless they would be material in a manner that is no less legitimate than anything we can in fact percieve.

Finally, is it possible for humans to perceive a phenomenon without being able to make meaningful interpretations of this phenomenon? Could there exist phenomena that we have some vague sense of, in that they physically impact our body, but our brain simply does not process these in full. We know for fact that our brain disgrads the majority of our sense data for the sake of energy conservation. Is it possible some physical pheomena have been disgarded as they are not evolutionarily relevant?

I don’t believe there is a clear answer to any of these questions, yet it seems that the standard belief is that the exterior world is strictly limited to what we can perceive and interpret. As such, I believe humans tend to overestimate their understanding of the material world and perhaps overestimate our dominance and advancement as a species.

Is it possible that other intelligent life exists but communicates through mediums that we cannot perceive? Is it even possible that other life forms on earth could be far more advanced than we realize? What else could be occupying the same physical space as us that we fail to perceive? Do these limits of perception limit us from perceiving higher-order spatial dimensions (maybe lower order too)?

The world that we perceive is infinitely rich, but by no means do we have a reason to assert that it is exhaustive of all that exists. Maybe we can eventually find ways to interact with more aspects of the material world than we ever thought was possible.