You take a photograph with a digital camera. You upload it to a computer. When you look at the image on the screen, it’s a familiar scene that you’ve just recorded. Underneath it though, is code, lots of code. While you see a picture, the image is produced on screen through a long string of coded information that the computer needs to display said image.

It’s not really all that different from your brain processing your sight. You open your eyes. Images are processed and the information is sent to your brain through signals in your nervous system. It is your brain that actually produces the image.

But there’s a tremendous difference between how a computer and a human brain translate and display images.

You can take two computers and connect them with a wire. That forms a network. Using software you can take the code of a photograph and send it to the second computer through the wire. The second computer, regardless of its operating system and sometimes regardless of its internal architecture, can then take that code and produce the exact same image that you first saw on the first computer.

The brain does not do that. If you witness two cars hitting each other on a street and a person standing next to you witnesses the same wreck, both of you can walk away with different interpretations about which driver was at fault. People disagree on what they see even if they see the same exact thing. You can show the same picture to two people and they can both see different things.

The point? No matter how much two people relate to each other whether it’s verbal or physical, it is impossible for one person to completely transmit their own personal experience to another. We can all look at the same thing and agree on the details of what we see but we can’t all see it the same. We can all listen to the same songs but we can’t fully share those songs between each other so that each person has the exact same code as another person.

No matter what we process through our experiences and reason, it is all colored by our individual minds. And every individual mind has its own color.

People, while they can communicate like a computer network, cannot have their brains wired together to share information and then experience that information in the precisely same manner. At the end of the day, all we really know is what we process through our own minds.

Is it any wonder then, that we can never fully agree on what reality is? We can all look at the same picture but we all have a different perspective.

Perhaps I’m wrong and reality does exist. It still doesn’t matter. We can never fully know reality because said reality would be processed by each of our different, unique minds.

Much of this boils down to the same question which I’ve posed many times on this blog: can something exist that is beyond our ability to experience? By that I mean is there something that we don’t possess the physiological necessities to experience? We didn’t have the ability to see bacteria until the microscope was invented. But even then, we had been experiencing bacteria (illness, etc.) despite the fact we couldn’t process its existence through base, empirical means. Our minds are incapable of processing the microscopic life form. But through technological advances, we can and did eventually experience it through sight.

I am speaking of something that can exist beyond any ability to experience; something that no amount of technology could ever find for us?

Or is the whole universe accessible to us and we can’t we just can’t experience it yet?