What about the booty?

What exactly is the difference between perceiving something and knowing something? Perceptions deal exclusively with sensory information; what we perceive is what we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel.

For instance, a red car sits in a driveway, bathed in sunlight. Any well-functioning human being would perceive the car as being the color red while someone who is colorblind would see the car as green. The absolute truth remains that the light that is emitted from the car’s surface is 700 nanometers in length, and as such it is truthfully red, but perceptions may slant this.

Knowledge on the other hand, is the recognition of absolute truth – fact. The information we, as humans, believe we 'know', has been filtered through our senses, which inevitably distort the true nature of this knowledge. In other words, in the act of perceiving, our senses warp the truth and leave us with biased information that we perceive to be knowledge. For this reason, an object's true nature may only be known by its creator. True knowledge is unattainable because we have not created the reality in which we live and therefore all our supposed knowledge is based on our slanted perceptions.

In discussing whether or not perception is necessary for knowledge, or vice versa, it is important to recognize that, very possibly, these 2 ideas may not be able to coexist at all. The idea of perception implies that our attempted understanding of a subject has been clouded by our own personal biases. Thus, it is an obstacle to attaining knowledge rather than an aid. The very nature of perception renders knowledge unobtainable because this cloud of bias is essentially impossible to prevent.

The reverse is even more complicated. As perception is fundamentally not based in truth, knowledge is not essential to it, per se. Going back to the car example, in perceiving the car to be 'red', we assume simple things like: a) the car exists and b) the perception we have of red is universal and true to its the actual nature of 'red'. These assumptions are based on perceptions that, again, we believe to be knowledge, but can never truly be because of the nature of observance as evidenced by Schrödinger's cat.

Although true knowledge theoretically cannot exist, we must make an effort to become as objective as is possible by identifying and eliminating the biases with which we perceive things. Our past and the limitations of our senses inevitably limit the veracity of our perceptions, but we must stride to use all that we have to gain an objective understanding of the universe and become one with it.