We Only Ever Feel Ourselves
Every sense reports a change inside our own body – the outside world, if it exists, is something we have never actually touched
🧊 The Cold Glass
I pick up a glass of cold water and I'm sure I feel the temperature of the glass. But nothing in my fingertip measures the glass. The receptors in my skin measure my skin. Heat flows out of my finger, the tissue around the nerve ending cools by a fraction of a degree, and the receptor fires. What I feel is my own temperature dropping.
✋ Nothing Ever Touches
Touch works the same way, and here the word itself is misleading: in the true sense, we never touch anything. When I press my palm on the table, no atom of my hand meets any atom of the wood. The electrons on my side push against the electrons on theirs, and the electromagnetic repulsion deforms my skin. Pressure receptors notice the deformation and send a signal. The solidity I feel so convincingly is a report about my own shape changing, not about the table.
👃 Taste, Smell, and the Locked Door
Even the senses that seem to let the world in don't. A molecule from the coffee docks into a receptor on my tongue or in my nose. But I never perceive the molecule. I perceive the relation between one of my cells and it – the receptor changes shape, the cell fires an impulse, and from that moment on everything happens inside. The molecule stays at the door. Only the news of it travels further.
👂 Hearing My Eardrum, Seeing My Retina
What I hear is my eardrum trembling. What I see is a chemical change in the cells of my retina when a photon is absorbed. The sound and the light both end at my surface. Past that point there is no sound and no light anymore – only nerve impulses, and they all look the same, whether they started as a violin, a sunset, or a cold glass of water.
🧠 Assembled in the Dark
The brain sits in a sealed, silent, lightless box and receives nothing but these spikes. From them it builds the whole rich, colored, warm, loud world I live in – and then edits it with memory, expectation, and the biases it never mentions. Even time and space are part of that construction, and so is the self standing in the middle of it. It's the same simulation of the universe every brain runs.
🚪 Does the Outside Exist?
Probably something is there. Something keeps pushing on my receptors in a consistent way, and other people report similar pushes. But that's an inference, not an observation. If there is an outside, I have never seen it, heard it, touched it, or tasted it – I've only ever registered what it does to me. The map is not the territory, and I've never been to the territory. Which makes the observer's role less of a quantum curiosity and more of a plain description of every moment: what I call the world is the shape my own body takes in response to it.