Where have I gone wrong? — creativesoul
I don't think pain is "in your foot," to begin with.
I might be wrong, but it feels to me like you're really trying to find something wrong in my questions at all costs. That's fine, don't get me wrong. Criticism is important.
I'll try and explain my reasoning in the simplest terms, as it's easier to spot fallacies when everything is laid out in a simple way.
Every organism's perception is different. Not all the living beings have the same set of senses, not every being interprets stimuli the same way, and even among species that share some senses, they aren't "set up" the same way. They vary in the range of perceivable "values," and how strong the perception is. Our sight is "stronger" than our "smell." I hope it's clear what I mean here.
So, since the way every being perceives reality differently, it appears to me that reality can't be traced down to being exactly equal to one's perception. It has to be something different, independent of any one's perception. Add to that the fact that anything we'll ever experience is a byproduct of our perception, because we think and feel through processing external data captured by our sensory organs.
So (1) reality is independent of our perception, (2) we all perceive things differently, (3) therefore any one's individual perception can't be flawless because it's clear from (1)-(2) that if a given individual's perception was perfect, then what's perceived by that individual is equal to reality. But even assuming that one individual perceives reality 100% flawlessly, then everyone else's still is flawed because it's different.
As a consequence to (3), perception doesn't seem to be reliable model of representation of reality. All we know is perception is flawed (it necessarily lacks something, or we would perceive infinite things at a given time), so what guarantee do we have that reality isn't entirely different than the small piece of it we can grasp?
We can only see x% of the photon wavelengths (colors) and only hear y% of the sound frequencies. Do you agree that the world would feel a lot different if we cold see and hear everything? Yet it actually IS like that, even if we're constantly missing a big chunk of it.