This somewhat philosophical thought occurred to me not-so-recently, and I’ve finally felt like writing about it. Have you ever thought that, even though people have the same physical processes for sensing and perceiving things, people may perceive things differently on an extraphysical level? That is, although someone may perceive black or white as different colors with their own attributes which others could similarly apply, maybe black and white look different on the level of consciousness for different people. In this case, the black I see may be the white another sees, although our eyes and physical minds may process the information similarly, and both of us would still describe black as “the darkest color” or white as “the lightest color,” and so on.

I suggested this to a friend who implied that maybe this could apply to all of the senses, including hearing, something which I had previously never thought of. This concept can indeed be interestingly applied to all of the senses. Let’s take music as an example. However, music with lyrics that affect whether or not one likes the piece of music must be excluded, since the rhythms and shades of words in languages are agreed upon to mean certain things and are not really open to interpretation in an extraphysical sense. So then, taking a Chopin piece, two people could theoretically hear it completely differently, even to the extent of the second person hearing that piece as the first would hear a Schubert piece of “comparable” complexity.

The friend also suggested that maybe if something like the previous example were true, then it would be possible that two people (or more— or even all people, by extension) to have the same taste on that extraphysical level, yet prefer completely different types of music, which would be what we normally use to distinguish taste (on the physical level). Who has similar or contrasting taste with anyone else becomes, perhaps, impossible to determine.

However, I’d like to add with some emphasis that I have no reason to believe that this concept of perception is true. Although it’s interesting to think about (for me, at least), and it has many interesting corollaries, I see no way to either prove or disprove this. It does assume, however, that there is something beyond the biological, physical processes of the human brain, which is also empirically impossible to prove. Thus, I’ve shelved this concept away, but I’ve decided to write about it because it’s something to think about.