Perception, an interesting word, though its meaning is ironically skewed through the way people perceive it, although the dictionary defines perception as “the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or the environment.” Essentially, perception is how you as a human being see, view, and altogether experience the world around you. The idea of perception is interesting in and of itself, as every human is aware of the fact that only they can perceive something in a certain way and that no other human being can ever experience that same thing in the same way. That was a confusing string of words, an example is required, okay, let’s see, look at something yellow. It is an inexplicable shade of the color. You have been taught the color from when you were little, the way you see the color yellow is ingrained into your memory through past experiences, although you have no way of knowing whether the color you see as yellow is even the same color that someone else sees as yellow.
Perception is different for everyone, and we really have no way of knowing what it really is. In reality, we don’t even know if perception exists, at least we are “sure” that it does for us, but we don’t know if anyone else’s perception even exists, let alone how it works. We have strong evidence to date that suggests that other people perceive things too, in all seriousness though, we really have no way of knowing.
There are even theories that state that we are actually living in a computer simulated world, a very advanced computer simulation, of course, and that our existence could easily end from just the accidental unplugging of a computer. This theory arises from the assumption that our civilization, in the far future, could have massive computing abilities, and through this, could run detailed simulations of organic minds to see them perceive and react to their simulated environment. Thus assumed, we could also be simulations run by a race for the same reasons, and they also could be simulated, this chain would go back as far as the first actual biological civilization to run a simulation.
Going back from that slightly depressing tangent, we come to the main point of writing this, the present. The present seems like such a short period of time, as you’re reading this, the moment after you process the words of this article, the words are becoming part of your past, even as I’m writing this, the letters that pass by my cursor are becoming the past, becoming part of my past and becoming part of the past of the world at the same time, interesting how this small piece is becoming logged in the past of the entire world, of the history of man, of ages and ages of the perceived and unfathomable beginning of time, leading all back to the letters passing by my cursor, strangely philosophical, is it not?
We have different quantified values for the present, according to the calculations of Max Planck, the present takes approximately 10-43 seconds, which would be the amount of time for a photon travelling at the speed of light to cross one Planck length, which would be approximately 1.6*10-35 meters. Both of these values are extremely small and arbitrary, but essentially, Planck believed that the present passes by at an almost nonexistent time frame. Other people believe that the present passes by in 200 milliseconds, and only to add to the confusion, it seems that our brains make decisions approximately 7 seconds before we are aware of its process. It looks like even our thoughts on the present are up to our own perception, how ironic. Perception is an interesting thing, and we have a logical idea of how it works, but in actuality, it goes deeper than what one sees, smells, touches, tastes, or hears. Something that we cannot explain or even prove, our perception.