An Apple is not Red, I love you.

If you read my last article, you'd know that I use AI to write these articles. I want to make that disclaimer before we proceed. Ironically I am not really an advocate of AI, although I am quite bad at writing a long collected article like this. I do not have the discipline to sit down and write it so structured in a way that someone would actually read it. So, to get my idea across, I use AI. This article was written based on the conversation I had with Deepseek. However, there are some lines that I came up with myself, which are italicized.

The Beautiful Lie Your Brain Tells You

Let’s start with a simple fact: the apple is not red.

This isn't a philosophical trick. It's physics. The apple is a collection of atoms that absorbs most light waves and reflects a specific set of them back to your eye. Your eye detects this wavelength and sends a raw, meaningless electrical signal to your brain. And then, in the total darkness of your skull, your brain performs its magic trick: it invents the color "red."

Color does not exist in the world. It exists only in the mind. It is a user interface - a brilliant, simplified translation of the universe’s complex data.

But this is just the beginning. This principle of illusion applies to everything.

Think about sound. We talk about the "speed of sound", but that’s a misnomer. There is no "sound" traveling through the air. There are only pressure waves, vibrations moving between atoms. Your brain takes that data and generates the experience of a symphony or a scream. The universe itself is silent.

Think about touch. You never truly touch anything. What you feel as "solid" is a repelling electromagnetic force field. The texture of rough sandpaper or smooth silk is your brain's abstract interpretation of intricate vibration patterns. It’s a summary report, not the raw data.

This is the grand truth: What you experience as "reality" is a controlled hallucination, generated by your brain.

It’s funny how the mind itself creates this reality for itself to dive in and float around.

Otherwise, the world is just a bunch of atoms and electromagnetic waves. We are just atoms.

This leads to a profound solitude. You and a friend can both look at a shape and agree it is a "circle." But the internal, qualitative experience of your "circle" could be what the other person internally experiences as a triangle. We agree on the label, but the internal experience is forever locked away. We navigate using a shared map, but the actual territory of our sensory experience is a private show.

This illusion extends beyond simple perception into the very nature of what we like and desire.

Beauty is not a choice. This is why beauty is subjective. It's not our thinking that creates this subjectiveness - it is an inherent property of the brain to create different interpretations. The feeling of a melody being beautiful or a food being delicious is a pre-programmed response. It is not that we choose to love things; it is a property that we have been programmed with. You are witnessing what your brain has decided for you.

So, why this elaborate illusion? Why doesn't our brain show us the "truth"?

According to the AI model, the standard answer is efficiency. We are told that abstraction is for speed. Knowing a surface is "slippery" is instantly useful. Knowing its exact molecular composition is computationally expensive and doesn't help you avoid falling. "Texture" is a quick-and-dirty survival summary.

But that is a conclusion from inside the human model of reality. The AI is after all, trained on human generated data - thus limiting it's capability to understand reality or provide opinions beyond that.

The more elegant idea is that we are running a compression algorithm. The raw, heavy data of the universe - the quantum fields, the vibrating atoms - is too vast. So our brain compresses it into simple, lossy concepts like "slippery," "red," or "loud." This isn't a failure; it's the most efficient method. We aren't avoiding the hard work of processing reality; we are expertly analyzing the compressed version because it's all our hardware can run.

This forces a deeper question: The human brain does not allow that. Is it because it cannot comprehend something different from the world it lives in - or, to be more accurate, the reality that was generated by the rules it was given to understand the universe?

The answer seems to be the latter. The brain is the rules. It can't perceive outside its own operating system because all its tools for perception are part of that same system.

This fundamental solitude makes the moments of deep connection so powerful. What if finding a soulmate, that person who feels like 'the one,' is not about shared interests, but something far deeper? What if it is the rare, inexplicable resonance between two people whose internal compression algorithms create shockingly similar interpretations? The same "red," the same "circle," the same inherent, programmed sense of beauty and truth. It would be the profound relief of feeling, for the first time, that someone else is running the same version of the simulation.

But that is a thought for another article, as I have come to love exploring these ideas with you.

We are trapped in a user-friendly interface, a compression algorithm for a mind that can't handle the uncompressed file of reality. We are convinced this simulation is all there is.

The mind itself creates a reality for itself to dive in and float around in. It is the greatest magic trick of all: a system that creates a world, and then forgets it has done so, losing itself completely in the beauty of its own illusion.

The apple isn't red. But the miracle is that you can experience it as if it were. That is the power, and the profound prison, of being human.