Of all the philosophical discussions and all the topics covered, none I think is more fundamentally important to understanding of the universe than Locke’s idea of the ‘veil of perception’. The idea that what we take in with our senses is not necessarily correspondent with reality shows us, more than anything, that critical thought is as or more important to understanding than observation alone. I think that this lesson is of paramount importance because it runs contrary to our intuition and general ideas about the nature of reality yet must be respected despite the limits it places on what we can objectively ‘know’.

Descartes uses the idea when breaking down what he can know exists. He uses the argument that we could be dreaming, our sensory experience coming from a source other than reality, and have no idea that we are viewing an illusory world. From this he states that the only thing we know for sure is that we are beings that have thoughts. Understanding that we are inextricably linked to our bodies’ perception yet cannot trust it is a difficult concept to accept, and one that we try to ignore, however it reminds us that things are not always how they appear.

Plato references the perception problem in his theory of forms. The allegory of the cave illustrates that our perceptions of the world are inherently unreliable, and that what we sense is ‘shadows’ of the true forms of objects. While Plato was making an entirely different point about the nature of reality, he too understood that perception cannot be trusted fully, that we are prisoners in our bodies, and unable to see the ‘true’ universe. Objectivity is impossible for us, because we cannot escape our frame of reference, and that frame of reference fundamentally changes everything we perceive.

In a more metaphorical sense, even ethics concepts illustrate the subjective nature of our experience