Excerpt from my in progress book.

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The Visual Perception of Everyday Things.

The science fiction movie, The Matrix, contains a famous scene in which the character Morpheus asks the protagonist Neo a simple yet profound question:

What is real?

The answer Morpheus gives (spoiler alert) is that, if we define reality by our experience, then “real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” My point here is not to perpetuate paranoid speculation about whether we live in a simulation, but rather to ask what the phrase “electrical signals interpreted by your brain” actually might mean. What does it mean to interpret visual sensory input? Put another way:

What is visual perception?

Now, I’m going to level with you. Despite spending over three (3) decades trying to answer this question, through scientific study and not a little quite contemplation, I don't have an answer. And quiet frankly nobody else does either. This is not a joke. There simply is no scientific definition of visual perception. In fact, if we did have a definition, then we would have a theory of visual perception, and then we’d probably have built machines that can perceive the world as we do, and, of course, eventually enslave us in their matrix world.

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