Previously, I began discussing the limitations of the five senses in evaluating what reality is and how it works. The perspective of the five senses provides a good starting point because they are universal biological instruments we all possess and they function with an equivalent capacity for the majority of people. Due to the common ground they provide, we are more easily able to exchange, relate to and build upon each other’s experiences.

Even though we all have a common point in our five senses, we do have other faculties which are not necessarily equivalent to each others’ with respect to neither their working nor total capacity. Consequently, we often differ vastly in how we experience, internalize and act upon reality. Even though the lack or shortage of any faculty renders the corresponding aspect of reality inaccessible, the power of curiosity and the passion to know the unknown is too great for some of us. These people not only find ways to compensate for or develop what they lack and gain access to the aspects of reality which were previously hidden from them, but they also leave behind paths which the rest of us can follow to transcend our own shortcomings.

One of these paths is science which studies the unfolding of reality based on a foundation consisting of experiments and theories. On one hand, cumulative experiments lead to new theories which aim to create meaning out of disconnected, raw data and describe the results of the experiments in a concise, elegant way. On the other hand, new theories are formulated based on previous theories and they seek validation through new experiments. The path of science is a purely objective one where there is room only for universally observable phenomena. Everything else is strictly excluded. Although it is simple, this methodology has proven very successful over the years. As discoveries chased one another, science has been progressively able to describe and predict reality with increasing precision while simultaneously revealing the deficiencies of our five senses and our commonsense.

The appeal of the path of science is that it is very easy to relate to without much mental resistance since everything science has discovered and put forth is universally observable by anyone, anywhere, any time as long as the right set of tools to carry out the experiments are available. It is hard to argue against results which are repeatable and personally verifiable. Even though science does not necessarily have all the answers or even all the important questions, it has made significant progress in finding gaps in our understanding of reality and it has plenty of commonsense-defying discoveries that definitely need to be integrated into our mental models.

Despite science’s appeal, the language of science, mathematics, is not very accessible to everyone. Being an abstract language, mathematics provides a universal framework which can easily describe intangible concepts and entities, sidestepping the subjective elements of human languages. However, its abstract nature combined with the difficulty of sensualizing its formulations restrict its use in everyday life. Thus, most of us never spend the effort to get fluent in it. Unfortunately, this sometimes results in misinterpretations which lead the uninformed and unsuspecting travelers of this path away from the objective of mastering reality.

The path of science is honest, insightful and nondiscriminative. Thus, it is an excellent companion on the quest to understanding and mastering reality, but keep in mind that it is only one of many available viewpoints.

Today, we are going to explore reality from the simplest of all perspectives: the five senses. After all, this is the level of reality we experience most of our Earth-bound lives and this is also right where the story began for our ancestors who had nothing else to work with in the beginning. Buckle up! Down the rabbit hole we go…

Funnels of perception

It is still, very still all around. Slowly, it is coming closer. The pillow gently cushioning. Little birds chirping outside. The warmth of the sun caresses. The enticing smell of fresh coffee and toast in the air. At last, the sunlight comes shining through…

Our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell are our principal means of experiencing everyday reality. Whatever registers on these senses, we call it physical and real. Everything else is as good as nonexistent. Until fairly recently, we did not even realize there was much more than what we could detect with these senses. However, science has shown us the truth that reality is much richer than what our funnels of perception allow us to grasp.

Zoom zoom zoom

The limits of these elementary input devices became evident once our tool-making abilities began to allow us to construct instruments that expanded the reach of our perception. Telescopes let the astronomers bring the planets and the stars nearby; microscopes helped the biologists peer into our bodies and observe the world of organs and cells; physicists could conduct experiments that were not possible before. Each incremental scientific discovery and its application as new technology got us deeper into matter and extend our gaze further out into space.

As the astronomers looked up to the boundless space, they started to realize just how vast it truly was. In fact, the distances were so great that it was impossible for a human being to reach most of the celestial objects within a single lifetime. For example, our own sun, which is relatively close to our planet, was found to be 100 million miles away from our planet! Can you even fathom 100 million of anything? They also found our place in our own galaxy, Milky Way. It was simply mindboggling just how gigantic the universe was and how inconsequential our Blue Marble was with respect to such enormity.

Strangely enough, scientists came across the same void as they dug further into the core of matter. To their amazement, the anatomy of matter very much resembled our own solar system… Particles orbiting other particles, distanced miles apart from each other and lots and lots of empty space in between! Astonishingly, 99% of the atomic structure was found to be empty space. Who would have thought?!

At this tiny scale of reality, we could no longer distinguish every day objects from each other. For example, one couldn’t tell where an apple ended and where the air surrounding it began. Furthermore, the properties of the building blocks of matter were such that if we rearranged them, we would get completely different substances with different properties when viewed from our level of perception. The arrangement of the atomic particles were significant in our world.

In the meantime, astronomers and physicists ran into some really strange things in space as well. They found out about blackholes which had stomachs big enough to swallow entire planets, stars and even galaxies in one sitting. If you are wondering what happens to an object once it is devoured by a blackhole, the answer is “Noone knows for sure” because not even light can escape from the claws of these hungry beasts! Scientists also heard the echos of the moment that spawned our universe still softly humming in the background. Dying stars… New born stars… Galaxy clusters… There was a whole other world out there which we could not reach but only watch from afar.

All these discoveries were very exciting indeed! We were finally making progress in understanding our world, figuring out how things worked and how to control our environment to suit our needs. It was as if the key to life was being handed to us on a silver platter. However, noone had anticipated what was next to come. As research continued with more elaborate experiments and ever more sensitive instruments, all of a sudden reality stopped making sense. Heads were being scratched; black smoke from the fiery discussions was clouding the sky. It turned out that our commonsense was less common than we thought.

Only a sliver

Before we move onto the stranger worlds below the atomic scale and leave behind the world of our five senses and our commonsense far behind, let us touch ever so gently on how much of reality we can really perceive with these senses based on our current knowledge.

Today we are all too aware of the electromagnetic phenomenon which brought us technologies such as the radio, the television, the microwave oven and the cellphone. As James C. Maxwell showed us in the mid-1860s, the light we see is an electromagnetic wave, a vibration of energy, occupying a tiny sliver of the infinite electromagnetic spectrum. The sound we hear is also a type of wave vibrating at low frequencies. We haven’t yet discovered where our sense of touch, taste and smell are located within this scale of infinite vibrations.

Evidently, the senses which we rely on very heavily in our everyday lives are able to deliver only a minuscule amount of the infinite spectral data. If we also factor in their ineffectiveness at very small and large distances, we can easily conclude that what we can perceive with them is not even the tip of the iceberg!

All these discoveries undeniably marked the end of the absoluteness of physical reality as dictated by our five senses. Even though they continue to shape our everyday experiences, we now know that they are only a sample of the complete truth and they become veils for those who cannot see past their limitations using their mental faculties.

Next, we continue exploring what else science can offer us with regards to covering up the blind spots of our commonsense and transcend the limitations of our five senses.