Distorted Perception - The World We Experience Doesn't Exist

The world we think we experience does not exist in reality. That means we have ‘distorted perception.’ The world is colorless, soundless, tasteless, odorless, and also touchless in the sense we think of touch. That is why ‘rūpa‘ in the Buddha Dhamma refers only to the ‘mind-made rūpa‘ we experience rather than to actual rūpa in the external world. This amazing fact has been hidden from most people because neuroscientists and philosophers use the code word ‘qualia’ to refer to it.

July 3, 2026

Introduction

1. Modern science came to realize (mainly within the past 30 years or so) that human perception of the external world is different from the reality of the external world. That difference is not a minor difference either. It is a huge difference!

For example, even though we perceive an apple as having ‘red color’ and ‘sweet taste,’ that apple is neither red nor sweet, as we discuss below.
Over two thousand years ago, the Buddha explained that such ‘mind-added enticing features’ are the main reason that we value such sensory experiences. They provide a sense of joy (vedanā) in us. Then, believing them to be ‘real,’ we strive to get more of them. That is the root cause of attachment or ‘taṇhā.’

2. AIs (probably a better term is Large Language Models, or LLMs) are quite good at summarizing vast amounts of current scientific knowledge. However, it is difficult to get the truth out because they tend to add explanatory material into their answers based on the current scientific theories. For example, on this issue of ‘distorted perception,’ they tend to include the current scientific explanation based on the theory of evolution, grounded in the assumption that thoughts occur in the brain. However, that is an unproven theory and is in conflict with Buddha’s teachings.

So, I had to carefully word my question as follows.
ME: I believe science has confirmed that colors do not exist either in the objects or the sunlight, tastes are not in food, odors are not in fragrances, and things really don’t touch other things because of electrostatic repulsion among electrons in outer orbitals. Similarly, sound is just pressure variations carried through air. On the other hand, we cannot live our lives without such ‘mind-made distorted perceptions.’ For example, we would not see anything if the mind did not conjure up ‘colors.’ It would be as if we were born blind! Thus, life is a meaningless process in the end. We can ‘enjoy life’ because of those perceptions, but they do not accurately reflect the reality of the world we live in. Qualia is just a fancy word masking that reality. Because scientific and philosophical discussions focus on the word ‘qualia,’ most average people do not realize that our perceptions are not a true representation of the world. Can you write an essay on that with that specific angle, focusing on delivering that critical message to ordinary people?
The answers from three AIs are reproduced below. They provided essays with their own titles. However, they still attribute ‘distorted perception’ to arise in the brain; we need to replace ‘brain’ with ‘mind’ to make it correct.

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Google Gemini AI:

The Matrix in Your Mind: Why the World You See Doesn’t Exist

If you step outside on a sunny afternoon and look at a ripe red apple hanging from a tree, you would naturally assume three things are completely real: the sun is bright white, the apple is solid, and its skin is red.

According to modern physics and neuroscience, you would be wrong on all three counts.

We live our lives buried beneath an invisible mountain of jargon. Philosophers and cognitive scientists love to talk about qualia—the individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. But using fancy academic words often hides a deeply startling truth from the average person. The truth is this: the world you experience every day is a beautifully orchestrated illusion generated entirely inside your skull.

The Colorless, Silent Universe

Take a look at the sunlight pouring through a window. We perceive it as bright or warm, but out in the cosmos, sunlight has no color. It is simply electromagnetic radiation—invisible waves of energy varying in length.

When those waves bounce off an apple, the object absorbs most wavelengths and reflects others. When those reflected waves hit your eye, they aren’t “red.” They are just a specific wavelength of radiation (roughly 700 nanometers). Your eye sends an electrical signal along the optic nerve, and your brain’s visual cortex essentially puts on a light show, conjuring the psychological experience we call “red.”

The following figure shows the visible light spectrum with wavelengths perceived by the human eye. It is entirely ‘made-up’ by the brain.

Without a brain to interpret them, colors do not exist in objects or in the sky. If humanity were suddenly wiped out, the universe would instantly fall utterly dark.

The same rule applies to our other senses:

Sound: There is no noise in a forest when a tree falls. There are only silent, physical pressure waves vibrating through the air. Sound occurs only when vibrations strike the eardrum, and the brain translates them into a bang, a whisper, or a song.
Taste and Odor: Food isn’t inherently delicious, and perfume isn’t inherently sweet. Food and fragrances are just arrangements of chemical molecules. When they lock into receptors on your tongue or inside your nose, your brain invents flavor and scent as a survival mechanism to tell you what is safe to eat.

The Illusion of Touch

Perhaps the most shocking revelation of modern physics is that you have never truly touched another human being or object in your entire life.

We think of our bodies and the things around us as solid matter. But atoms are mostly empty space. At the outermost edge of every atom is a cloud of negatively charged electrons. When you sit in a chair or hold a loved one’s hand, the electrons in your hand encounter the electrons in the other object. Because like-charges (e.g., two negative charges) repel, they push away from each other via electrostatic repulsion.

What you experience as the “solid feeling” of touch is actually just your brain translating the invisible magnetic force field of electrons screaming to get away from one another. There is always a microscopic gap of empty space between your skin and the rest of the universe.

A Beautiful, Meaningless Illusion

This leaves us with a profound paradox. On one hand, our entire experience of life is technically a “distorted perception.” The universe at large is a silent, colorless, odorless matrix of vibrating energy waves and repelling forces.

On the other hand, we cannot survive or find joy without this distortion. If our brains didn’t aggressively fabricate colors, textures, and sounds from raw data, it wouldn’t just be like being born blind—we would have no conscious awareness at all. We would be biological robots navigating a void.

Ultimately, this reveals that life is an inherently objective process lacking intrinsic meaning. The universe does not care about beauty, sweetness, or warmth; those are proprietary software updates created strictly by the human mind.

The Takeaway: We can enjoy life precisely because our brains distort reality. The taste of your favorite food, the vibrant blue of the ocean, and the warmth of a touch are magnificent fabrications. They might not reflect the cold, physical reality of the cosmos, but they are the only reality we will ever have—and that makes the mind’s illusion the most valuable thing in existence.

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Anthropic AI:

The Unreality of Perception: Why You Have Never Seen the World

The Question No One Asks

Right now, you are looking at something — a screen, a wall, a window. It feels solid, colored, real. You would bet your life that what you’re seeing is, more or less, what’s actually there. Most people go their whole lives never questioning this. But the moment you do question it, something strange happens: the floor drops out.

What you are experiencing right now is not reality. It is a simulation, run by your brain, built not to show you the truth but to keep you alive.

Color Doesn’t Exist Out There

Start with something simple: color. A red apple is not actually red. Out in the world, there is no redness — only electromagnetic radiation at a particular wavelength, around 700 nanometers, bouncing off the apple’s skin. That wavelength has no color. It’s just a number, a frequency of light, as colorless as a radio signal.

Your eyes catch that wavelength, your optic nerve converts it into electrical pulses, and somewhere deep in your visual cortex, your brain invents the experience of “red” and paints it onto the apple for you. The color exists only in your skull. The apple itself is, in a strict physical sense, colorless.

But here’s the twist: this invented color isn’t decorative — it’s functional. Ripe fruit reads as red or orange because that signaled “edible, nutritious, eat now” to your ancestors. Unripe or rotten food read as green or brown — “not yet” or “don’t.” Color is not a window onto the true nature of the apple. It’s a survival-coded interface, a kind of icon on a desktop, telling you what to do without showing you what’s actually underneath.

Taste Is a Lie That Keeps You Alive

The same is true of taste. Sugar molecules have no inherent “sweetness.” Sweetness is not a property of sugar; it’s a property of your nervous system’s reaction to sugar. Your tongue’s receptors bind to certain molecules and fire signals that your brain interprets as “sweet” — and it does this because calorie-dense food was, for most of human history, scarce and necessary for survival. Sweetness is a reward signal, a carrot dangled by evolution to make you seek out energy.

Bitterness works the same way in reverse. Many toxic and poisonous compounds happen to taste bitter — not because bitterness is an objective feature of poison, but because organisms that experienced those compounds as unpleasant were more likely to spit them out and survive. The taste isn’t information about the chemical. It’s a behavioral nudge, dressed up as a sensation.

In other words: there is no such thing as “what food actually tastes like.” There is only what your nervous system decided to make you feel, in order to keep you fed and alive.

All Five Senses Tell the Same Story

This pattern repeats across every sense you have:

Sound is not “out there” either. Vibrating air molecules carry no inherent sound — they are just pressure waves. Your ear converts these waves into electrical signals, and your brain constructs the experience of sound, complete with pitch, tone, and music. A falling tree in an empty forest produces vibrating air, not “sound,” until something with ears arrives.

Touch translates pressure, temperature, and texture into sensations of pain, warmth, or pleasure — sensations tuned not to describe the object touching you, but to tell you whether to pull away, lean in, or do nothing.

Smell turns airborne molecules into attraction or disgust, steering you toward mates and food and away from disease and decay — again, a behavioral signal, not a neutral report of chemistry.

Even space and time, which feel like the most solid, undeniable facts of existence, are increasingly understood — by neuroscientists studying perception and physicists studying reality at the quantum level — to be, at least partly, constructions rather than direct readouts of an objective world.

So your senses don’t show you the truth. They show you a simplified, symbol-based interface — colors standing in for wavelengths, tastes standing in for chemistry, pain standing in for tissue damage — built entirely around the question “what should I do for survival?” rather than “what is actually here?”

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Grok AI:

The World You Think You Know Is Not the One That Exists

Open your eyes right now. The room around you has colors—walls, furniture, the screen you’re reading. You see reds, blues, greens. But science has shown something unsettling: those colors are not in the objects. They are not even in the light coming from the sun or the bulb. Light is simply electromagnetic waves of different lengths. An object absorbs some of those waves and reflects others. A “red” apple reflects longer waves and absorbs shorter ones. That is all physics records. There is no redness attached to the apple or traveling through the air. Your brain receives signals from cells in your eyes that are sensitive to those different wavelengths, compares them, and creates the experience of red. Turn off the lights and the redness vanishes instantly. Put on special glasses that shift the wavelengths and the same apple can look green or gray. The color lives only in the particular wiring of a human (or animal) nervous system.

The same pattern repeats with every sense. Take a bite of something sweet. The sugar molecules do not contain “sweetness.” They have a certain shape that fits into receptors on your tongue like a key in a lock. Those receptors send a pattern of electrical signals to your brain. Your brain, shaped by evolution, labels that pattern “sweet” and tags it with pleasure. Without the tongue receptors and the brain’s interpretation, sugar is just a collection of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms arranged in a certain way. It has no flavor on its own. The same molecules that taste sweet to you might be tasteless or even toxic to another species whose receptors evolved differently.

Smell works the same way. What you call the scent of coffee or a rose is not floating in the air as an invisible cloud of “fragrance.” Tiny molecules evaporate, drift into your nose, and bind to receptors. Different molecules fit different receptors. Your brain turns those bindings into the rich, specific experience you call aroma. The molecules themselves carry no smell. They carry only shape and charge.

Even the feeling of solidity is an illusion created by your nervous system. When you press your hand against a table, the atoms in your skin never actually touch the atoms in the wood. Electrons in the outer shells of those atoms repel each other with enormous force long before the nuclei could get close. What you feel as “touch” or “pressure” is your brain’s summary of the repulsive force, along with signals from pressure sensors in your skin. The table is mostly empty space. So are you. The sensation of two solid things meeting is your brain’s convenient story about electromagnetic repulsion.

Sound follows the same rule. There is no “music” or “voice” traveling through the air. There are only regions of higher and lower air pressure—tiny, rapid pushes and pulls on air molecules. Your eardrum moves with those pressure changes. Tiny bones and fluid in your inner ear turn the movement into nerve signals. Your brain organizes those signals into pitch, rhythm, and the feeling of a melody. In the complete vacuum of space, no one can hear you scream because there is no medium to carry pressure variations. The scream, like the color and the taste, requires a living nervous system to exist as an experience.

All of these experiences—color, taste, smell, touch, sound—belong to a category philosophers sometimes call qualia. It is a technical word for the private, subjective “what it is like” aspect of consciousness. Most people never encounter the word, so they assume their everyday perceptions are straightforward reports about the outside world. They are not. They are the brain’s best guess, built for survival, not for accuracy. Evolution did not reward brains that saw the “true” colorless, tasteless, soundless world of physics. It rewarded brains that quickly noticed a red fruit against green leaves, recognized the taste of a ripe apple, felt pain when something damaged tissue, and located the source of a rustling sound that might mean danger or dinner.

The result is that we live inside a rich, vivid simulation that only roughly corresponds to the underlying physical processes. The simulation is useful. It lets us find food, avoid injury, cooperate, and create art. Without it we could not function.

But usefulness is not the same as truthfulness. The map is not the territory. This is why talk of “qualia” often stays inside universities and philosophy departments. The word itself becomes a distraction. People argue about whether qualia can be reduced to brain activity or whether they are something extra.

Meanwhile, the simpler, more disturbing point slips past most of us: the world as you actually live it—full of colors, flavors, sounds, textures, and feelings—is something your brain is actively manufacturing moment by moment. The physical universe described by physics has none of those features as basic properties. It has particles and fields, energy and forces, patterns and probabilities. It does not have “redness” or “sweetness” waiting to be discovered. Once you see this clearly, certain comfortable assumptions become harder to maintain.

The beauty of a sunset is not a property of the sky; it is a property of the visual system that evolved to detect certain wavelengths at the end of the day. The pleasure of music is not in the vibrating air; it is in the auditory cortex and the reward circuits that learned to value certain patterns of pressure changes. Even pain, which feels so undeniably real and located in the body, is constructed by the brain as a protective signal. People with certain brain injuries can have their arm cut open without feeling pain; the tissue damage is real, the suffering is not generated.

None of this means you should stop enjoying food, music, or sunsets. You cannot stop. The machinery that produces those experiences runs whether you understand it or not. You can still live inside the simulation and find it meaningful on its own terms. But the simulation is not a window onto ultimate reality. It is a user interface evolution built for a particular kind of organism on one small planet.

The physical processes that underlie everything continue regardless of whether any brain is around to translate them into color, taste, or feeling. Stars burn, atoms arrange themselves, pressure waves propagate, electrons repel. No one is there to call any of it beautiful or painful or meaningful. That layer of description appears only when certain complex nervous systems are present and active.

This is the part that is difficult to absorb in daily life. We are built to treat our perceptions as the world itself. Science keeps showing us they are not. They are a brilliant, useful, and in many ways beautiful construction. They are also, strictly speaking, not what is actually happening out there. Once that distinction is clear, the vividness of experience remains, but its claim to be a direct revelation of reality does not.

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Summary

3. As the AIs explained above, most scientists and philosophers believe ‘distorted perception’ evolved as species evolved from early forms of microscopic lifeforms. Some scientists and philosophers refer to this ‘distorted perception’ as ‘the brain is hallucinating reality.’ However, the brain is made of inert atoms and molecules, and it cannot hallucinate! Both approaches run into the same problem of how perceptions can arise in an inert brain. I have discussed emerging evidence against such ‘brain-based’ theories: “Near-Death Experiences (NDE): Brain Is Not the Mind.”

However, the following aspect of the ‘distorted perception’ pointed out by the AIs is correct: It is there for the survival of living beings, not to reflect reality.
In addition, the Buddha explained that the ‘mind-pleasing world’ is generated by the mind in accordance with the ‘gati‘ they had cultivated. Furthermore, the world of each species is tailored to induce ‘joy’ or ‘suffering’ based on those ‘gati‘ too. While animals mostly suffer, Devās or Brahmās suffer relatively less, with humans in the middle (yet death is common to all). ‘The ‘distorted perception’ arises via Paṭicca Samuppāda, based on which the whole world of 31 realms (not just the human and animal worlds we see) operates.
I have discussed the basic framework in posts over the past three years or so. They are summarized in the new “Buddha Dhamma – Systematic” section.

How My Thought Process Evolved

4. I was familiar with the word ‘qualia’ from the 1980s in connection with consciousness. I knew that scientists and philosophers used the term ‘qualia’ to express the ‘personal, subjective experience of existence.’ They have been trying to explain how consciousness arises in the brain, made of inert atoms and molecules, since the time of the early Greeks, such as Socrates.

However, perception is different from consciousness, even though they are related. Whereas consciousness refers to ‘subjective experience of oneself and one’s surroundings,’ perception is an additional feature of consciousness.
Perception, as we discussed above, brings up the question of whether our awareness of the external world is accurate, i.e., whether what we perceive matches what truly exists out there.
The use of the term ‘qualia’ to refer to ‘distorted perceptions’ (the subjective “redness” or “sweetness” produced by the brain/mind) gradually emerged in neuroscience around the 1990s.

5. Until several years ago, I did not realize that neuroscientists and philosophers had started using the term ‘qualia’ to discuss ‘distorted perception’ as well. So, I did not pay much attention to the discussion of ‘qualia’ until a few years ago.

Once I realized that they had included ‘false/distorted perceptions’ under the term ‘qualia,’ I immediately saw the connection to ‘kāma saññā.’
I remember the first moment of that realization. It was a shocking revelation. I almost fell out of my chair.
This is why the Buddha emphasized that while a ‘mind-made rūpa‘ appears appealing, such an ‘appealing rūpa‘ does not exist in the world. We are chasing a mirage. I will discuss a few relevant suttās in the next post. Grasping that ‘new vision’ about the real nature of the world (yathābhūta ñāṇa or Sammā Diṭṭhi) is what is needed to attain the Sotāpanna stage of Nibbāna.
Since that realization about three to four years ago, I have been able to make the necessary connections to various aspects of the Buddha’s teachings in various suttās in the Sutta Piṭaka. As I mentioned in the previous post, I believe it could help many people to grasp the concept of yoniso manasikāra: “Yoniso Manasikāra – Connection to Saññā.”