What comprises the color of a forest or your
child’s eyes?
Is the experience “blue” always the same,
no matter who is perceiving?
The rose, as they say, is red, and I see it
as red.
This implies that perception is a passive
process.
That is far from the case.
Perception is a conscious act.
Light, itself, has neither color nor brightness.
Our awareness entangles it with those properties.
In the words of Sir John Eccles, a famous
British neurologist, ‘I want you to realize
that there exists no color in the natural
world, and no sound – nothing of this kind;
no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.’
The only reason a rose is red is that you
have a human nervous system that registers
a frequency of electromagnetic radiation,
or light, as a certain experience that we
call red.
But would it be the same for other species?
We have no way of knowing how a bumblebee
or a dog experiences the world.
Making perception the whole key to reality,
is where physics – and all science – needs
to progress.
We are used to making the world “out there”
a fixed, reliable point of reference.
But quantum theory has informed us that this
is not the case, and spiritual teachings for
thousands of years corroborate this point.
No object, however big or small, from subatomic
particles to vast galaxies, has fixed properties.
All the properties that create reality are
contextual.
Reality, as it turns out, is mind-made.
