Some people think they're being deep when they say "A red rose isn't actually red; it reflects red light and absorbs all the other colors of light."
But that isn't deep. I'll show you deep:
The red rose is not red because red light is not red. The real universe has no colors, smells, or anything else of the sort. It "is" colorless and odorless. It "is" just a bunch of particles/waves moving through spacetime. Your senses take readings, the same way sensors on a spaceship in Star Trek do, and relay that data to your brain.
The universe you experience with your senses "is" your brain taking that raw, limited sensory data and creating a hallucination based on that limited sensory data. The way things look to us "is" due to the brain's software. Red looks the way it does because our brain's software "is" programmed by a combo of DNA programming and environmental programming.
The human brain is like a computer; every human brain being unique, it's like if every computer in the world had its own operating system. But because we have to be able to communicate with one another, there are more similarities than differences between brain operating systems. Which is why we can all recognize red when we see it (unless we're color blind or something of the sort). (This is similar to how computers with different operating systems can communicate web pages and other files over the Internet, and understand one another most of the time.)
So, really, the only thing we can truly say about reality is that it exists. The rest is just our brain hallucinating. And because we're all wired more or less the same, that makes reality mostly a shared hallucination.
This was cross-posted from
http://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org/192003.html You can comment either here or there.