our perception of reality is limited

Source: our perception of reality is limited, Jules, 1:42:10, uploaded 2025-07-07, Watch Later position 426.

Jules begins with an emperor penguin. Its world contains snow, cold, oceans, fish, and the wide landscape of an Arctic biome. A city, a desert, or Greenland would seem as strange to it as the Arctic can seem to a human being. The example gives reality a lived meaning. A creature can share a planet with us whilst experiencing a version of it that we cannot enter.

The same problem appears in a room. I can describe the room from inside it, and you can describe the room from your position, yet neither of us can step outside the perspective that makes the description possible. Information and empathy can show us how another person sees something. They cannot give us the experience itself. Jules calls this an inherently solipsistic perception of an objective reality: the world may exist beyond us, whilst each organism receives only the slice that its body, senses, history, and language allow.

Colour and the human slice of reality

The first limit is perceptual. The inverted-spectrum thought experiment imagines two people who use the same colour words and behave in the same world whilst their private colour experiences differ. Both look at an apple and call it red. One person’s red could correspond to the other’s green, yet neither person has a measurable defect that would reveal the difference. They can communicate the label and never communicate the sensation. The thought experiment remains untestable because a person can report the colour they see, whilst the report itself still passes through the person’s own experience.

Human vision also leaves out large parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Jules gives the usual range of roughly 400 to 700 nanometres for human sight and points to people whose eyes lack a lens. The lens normally blocks ultraviolet light, so its removal can widen the range of light that reaches the eye. The condition brings blurred close vision and headaches, which makes it a poor bargain as an enhancement. It still demonstrates the limit. The eye filters the world according to what the human body needs to use.

The video tells the story of Claude Monet’s cataracts and later lens removal in this context. Cataracts made his colours muddy and left him feeling as if he saw through fog. After the lens in his left eye was removed, he could see familiar colours again and could also register ultraviolet light. The water lilies that usually appeared white took on a bluish cast in his paintings. Jules treats Monet’s altered sight as evidence of a wider point rather than as a desirable medical state: the human eye gives us a workable view of reality, then the body makes that view feel complete.

Species-specific realities

Solipsism usually names the position that only one’s own mind is certain to exist. Jules rejects the grandiose version, in which the universe exists only when the speaker looks at it, whilst keeping the narrower biological claim. Every species has a private way of receiving the same environment. A bat uses echolocation, a garden snail sees through a black-and-white blur, and a mantis shrimp has sixteen kinds of colour receptor compared with the human three. Mantis shrimp can register ultraviolet and polarised light, whose waves oscillate in one direction. Their world contains information that human vision cannot supply.

Human inventions give a less biological version of the same pattern. Early cameras recorded scenes through two tones of light, and black-and-white film eventually became an artistic choice after colour technology made other forms possible. Video games once made the graphics of Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and the original Halo look like a technical ceiling. Later systems introduced ray tracing and much greater visual detail. Stereo recording went through a similar transition. Early Beatles mixes could place a voice in one headphone and instruments in the other because producers were still learning what the new format could do. A Walkman library of twenty-five songs gave way to the iPod’s thousand songs, then to streaming’s near-infinite catalogue.

These examples support Jules’s speculation about the human body. A future generation might treat ordinary human vision as a primitive interface and extend the eye into infrared or ultraviolet. The ear could receive pitches that are currently imagined through animal calls or scientific descriptions. Taste could gain enough receptors to divide what we call sweet, bitter, or delicious into a much larger vocabulary. Heat signatures, magnetic fields, and energy fields could become visible parts of a landscape that already exists around us.

The dog on a forest path makes the difference concrete. The human notices violet flowers and the contrast between them and the weeds. The dog smells chemical trails from hikers who passed hours earlier and reads the route as a history of scent. Both bodies move through the same path. Their accounts of the place barely overlap. Jules extends the thought to termites, whose black-and-white world would shape every metaphor they used if they reached human-level language. Colour would not add a small feature to their reality. It would reorganise the whole thing.

This shared world therefore becomes a consensus of illusion. A mind can accept that more exists beyond its senses, whilst a body learns only what it has encountered. A complete archive of human experience would still be a human archive. Every book, song, person, and video could be collected without producing the totality of existence, since the collection would remain filtered through human biology.

Emotion as another filter

The same constraint appears in feeling. Jules uses the jellyfish as an example. A jellyfish can react to predators without having the human experience of pain, so pain can seem like a universal condition of life whilst belonging to a particular nervous system. A person who is sleep-deprived can listen to a beautiful piece of music and fail to receive its full force. A hangover can flatten a profound sentence. Mood stabilisers, antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychedelics, cannabis, and other drugs can alter the routes through which a person experiences the world. Neurochemistry changes the apparent character of reality.

Jules connects this fact to the contemporary environment. Human bodies evolved for smaller social groups and more immediate dangers, then found themselves exposed to constant information, distant catastrophes, and systems that monetise fear and anger. Anxiety and numbness become common responses. Numbing oneself can make a damaged world easier to watch for a while. It can also leave grief, resentment, and desperation without a way to move through the body. A song, a death, or some ordinary scene can then break the numbness and release years of feeling at once.

The personal account becomes the centre of this chapter. Jules says that he used to cry as a child, then grew distant from his emotions during his teenage years. When people he loved died, he could feel sadness without reaching the release that might have helped him grieve. The apparent control turned into bitterness, a sense of anaesthesia, and a wish to feel something strongly enough to break through.

Reading became one way to approach that missing feeling. Jules describes philosophy and literature as a collection of private attempts to remain sane. Dead authors are separated from the frantic demand to stay relevant, and their books allow a reader to sit with an idea without an autoplay queue, comment section, or immediate judgement from other viewers. He calls his appetite for increasingly difficult and obscure knowledge a “philosophical treadmill”. Each new insight briefly supplies a feeling of movement, then leaves the same hunger behind.

The phrase that stays with him is “this too shall pass”. He cannot identify where he first found “everything passes”, and the source document says that the better-known phrase has often been wrongly attributed to the Bible. Jules connects it to a Persian story about a king who asks wise people for a sentence that will comfort him in every situation, then to Abraham Lincoln’s 1859 speech, where Lincoln praises the phrase whilst hoping that a society can build values that outlast ordinary decay. The original authorship remains uncertain in the source account. The phrase matters to Jules because its truth does not depend on a clever theory or on the ego of a named thinker. Pain, joy, love, illness, pride, and the body itself all change.

Art and expression offer a way across the gap between individual minds. A cave handprint, a book, a song, a monument, or a YouTube video leaves some trace of one person’s experience for another person to receive. The transfer remains incomplete, yet it gives a reader or viewer contact with a reality that began somewhere else. Jules treats this as humanity’s lasting answer to being alone together. Expression does not remove solipsism. It makes the solitude shared.

Familiarity, knowledge, and the missing context

Jules then turns from the senses to the limits of understanding. Philosophy, he argues, becomes misleading when it is sold as a single universal answer. Passivity may help someone in one situation and leave another person exposed to exploitation. A self-improvement doctrine can give an individual a useful tool whilst becoming cruel when it treats systemic failure as a personal defect. Philosophy works better as a toolkit shaped by the person’s circumstances than as a script for everyone.

Familiarity supplies another kind of filter. Knowing a street, a house, a family member, or a footballing partner through repeated contact gives practical knowledge that a list of facts cannot replace. A midfielder may know exactly where a familiar striker can receive a pass, even though the striker cannot run fast enough to escape the defence. Familiarity helps people predict one another and live together.

It also creates a false sense of comprehension. Jules imagines speaking with a friend who has just developed pancreatic cancer. The conversation feels ordinary because the friend’s presence has become a stable fact in his life, although neither person yet knows that the friend will die within months. Familiarity fills in the unknown parts of the situation with the reassuring outline of what has always been there. It keeps daily life functional whilst concealing how little one person can know about another.

Geography widens the gap. Jules imagines a person raised in an Australian forest, surrounded by kookaburras, cockatoos, and bush turkeys, trying to relate to someone who lives on a plane of ice or in a desert. He then imagines descendants living on another planet, with different gravity, skies, moons, and atmospheric conditions. Shared human biology would leave a connection between them, yet it would not erase the contexts that shape their idea of life.

Language carries the same weakness. Jules admits that the video cannot transmit the thought in his head as it exists before he speaks. A visual image can persuade quickly because it reaches the viewer before a full verbal explanation. Propaganda and advertising use that pre-verbal force, and political movements turn opponents into simple visual figures. A future system that transferred a person’s sensations directly could let someone feel another person’s love, fear, or memory without translating it into words. It could also make older forms of communication seem crude. The possibility carries intimacy and manipulation in the same mechanism.

Knowledge itself passes away. Cultures lose their references, metaphors, places, and shared connections. A person also remembers a subject through later priorities, so even intense study changes in memory as time filters it. Jules uses this limit to criticise sweeping nihilism. A person who has seen one page of a thousand-page book cannot declare the whole book meaningless. Human beings know enough to recognise their own ignorance, yet still tend to judge existence from the small part that their bodies have made available.

BCIs and the dream of a wider perception

The desire to see beyond the human slice leads Jules to brain-computer interfaces. He includes a news segment about Keith, whose implanted brain chips helped restore movement and sensation after paralysis. The segment describes surgeons mapping parts of Keith’s brain, then building a loop in which artificial intelligence interprets signals and redirects them to the body and spine. Keith describes a jolt of energy when he picks up a cup and later feels his sister’s palm. Jules presents the case as a beginning rather than as proof that consciousness can already be transmitted.

He expects practical pressure to push this technology forward. Early sensory enhancements look clumsy and expensive, while a brain interface sits inside the organ that already manages perception. If artificial intelligence changes work fast enough, people may adopt neural enhancements to remain competitive. The industrial revolution and the printing press show how a change introduced for one purpose can reorganise the conditions of daily life. A BCI introduced to restore movement could later open access to altered sight, new sensory ranges, or direct exchanges of experience.

That future could settle the inverted-spectrum problem. If one person could transmit the experience of red to another, the difference between their colour worlds could become observable rather than hypothetical. A complete record of a life might allow someone else to replay an experience from birth to death as a sequence of conscious sensations. Jules acknowledges the absurdity of speculating about this whilst consciousness remains poorly understood. He still argues that people need to discuss its possible consequences before the technology becomes unavoidable.

The darker version begins with convenience. Advertisements could enter the optic nerve. A virtual world could feel more rewarding than ordinary life because the body itself would receive the artificial environment as real. A BCI could control limbs, regulate soldiers’ fear and aggression, or reduce empathy and hesitation for military use. Jules marks these possibilities as speculative and says that he hopes his forecast is wrong. The point is to treat foresight as a responsibility after the failures to discuss the early consequences of social media and artificial intelligence.

The political danger concerns individual solutions to systemic harm. Young people who face high housing costs, weak class mobility, and an economy that has failed them are often taught to treat their situation as a personal failure. Influencers sell courses and self-improvement systems to people who have been pushed into a competition they did not design. A technology that changes mood could turn the same logic into bodily governance. People could learn to feel comfortable inside worsening conditions whilst the conditions remain untouched.

Jules quotes an unnamed infamous thinker who imagines a society that makes people unhappy, then gives them drugs so they can tolerate the society. He separates this warning from any general claim against medication or self-improvement. The danger lies in changing the person whenever a system causes pain. A BCI could remove discomfort from an experience that still deserves resistance. The result might feel like peace and personal optimisation whilst it ends the pressure that makes injustice visible.

The fully curated reality would produce a new form of solitude. A person could retreat into a private world, alter the body, and suppress the feelings that connect individual suffering to the suffering of others. Leaders could watch people starve without feeling the weight of their decisions. A population could lose the capacity to rebel whilst experiencing the arrangement as freedom. Jules imagines future people looking back at present human perception as a fragile, unmodified state whose art records what existence felt like before the body became another platform.

Genetic constraint and the cost of removing pain

The next chapter returns to the body. Hair and fingernails grow, blood circulates, sperm cells develop, and neurons fire before conscious attention begins. Jules describes a genetic script that started before his first thought. The body supplies the lifespan, senses, appetites, emotions, and habits through which a person tries to make choices. That raises the free-will question: if I cannot separate what I like from the body that produces the liking, where does control begin?

Jules’s answer remains partial. Thoughts feel less animal and more open than the skull, ribs, organs, and reflexes that support them. He accepts that human perception is curated for survival and that companies, politicians, and influencers can exploit the same ancient drives that once helped people survive. He still feels a will inside the body that exceeds its conditions. The body limits a person’s possibilities without fixing every action in advance. The video ends its determinism argument with that distinction between being constrained and being predetermined.

Changing the body’s limits could also remove parts of a person that make life matter. Longing gives reunion its force. Grief records the importance of someone who has died. Anger can preserve a judgement that an event was wrong. Jules wants people to miss him when he is gone, since that absence would show that his life had changed theirs. Removing every painful emotion could also remove the connection that makes love, art, jokes, hugs, and kisses significant.

He leaves room for targeted relief. Someone with severe anxiety might dampen an amygdala response during a flight and restore it later. A person could set aside time to grieve instead of letting grief destroy every obligation. Jules does not ask people to romanticise cluster headaches, cancer, or constant fear. The ethical question concerns the difference between treating suffering that crushes a person and deleting the discomfort that might still carry knowledge about a situation.

The penguin, the night, and expression

The conclusion begins at around one in the morning. Jules is exhausted, unable to sleep, and playing Call of Duty to avoid the silence. He scrolls through nature videos and finds an account of a baby emperor penguin separated from its mother in the cold. The chick eventually finds warmth in the colony, whilst its father remains away hunting and risks dying alone after killer whales separate him from the other males. The penguin family survives in a hostile environment because the animals gather together.

The documentary and an atmospheric instrumental track break through Jules’s numbness. He remembers old friends, holidays, a dog, his grandparents, and the ordinary details that made him who he is. He wants to thank his grandparents for food, sleepovers, walks, ducks, and old music. He wants to tell his girlfriend how much she has changed his sense of what kind of man he can be. Memories of people he has lost return alongside the recognition that every stranger on the street carries a private history he will never see.

The feeling sends him to his laptop. He notices the moon, the cold air, the distant city lights, and the fact that his body has been carrying years of emotion without giving him a clear way to process it. Other people have described similar moments in which a small event breaks a long period of numbness and turns motion into feeling. Jules treats the experience as the origin of the video itself.

Writing remains limited. He spends months reading about perception, species, and the possible dystopia of escaping biology, then doubts the work until it is finished. The same uncertainty belongs to every writer he admires. Each person leaves a small piece of consciousness for someone else, and those pieces form a network across generations. The distant skyscraper exists because earlier people imagined it and built it, so Jules can look at it from his window without knowing the lives that made it possible.

The penguin story returns the abstract argument to a human scale. A person exists inside more than they can see, receives reality through a body they did not design, and still makes something that another mind can enter. The limits remain. They become the conditions under which attention, care, memory, and expression can pass between people.

Limits

The video combines personal reflection, philosophical thought experiments, reported examples, news footage, and future speculation. Its claims about colour vision, Monet, mantis shrimp, animal perception, neurochemistry, brain-computer interfaces, and the effects of future augmentation remain attached to Jules’s account here. The source description supplies a reference document, although that document contains a mixture of primary sources, journalism, explanatory pages, videos, and sources the creator says may have been forgotten.

The BCI discussion is explicitly hypothetical beyond the reported restoration of movement and sensation. The predictions about workplace pressure, military control, artificial peace, and private virtual realities are arguments about possible consequences rather than evidence about present systems. The note keeps that distinction because the video’s force comes from holding wonder and fear in the same frame.

Further reading / references

• Visual sources listed by Jules: a Reddit post about solipsism and vision, Snow Chick: A Penguin’s Tale (2015), and stock footage from Envato.
• Edward Hopper, “Hotel Room”, listed as the source for the hotel poem.
• Ed Yong, An Immense World, which Jules calls vital background reading.
• The Atlantic on the mantis shrimp’s eye, London Vision Clinic on colours outside ordinary human sight, and PetaPixel on ultraviolet vision after lens removal.
• Grunge on Monet’s ultraviolet vision, Carl Zimmer’s account of Monet’s ultraviolet eye, and the Natural History Museum’s survey of animal vision.
• Polarised light, a video source listed by Jules.
• The Beatles and stereo recording, listed alongside the video’s discussion of changing audio formats.
• Brain-computer interfaces, listed as background for the BCI section.
• Abraham Lincoln and “And This Too Shall Pass Away”, alongside the uncertain Persian origins discussed in the video.
• Vsauce, “Is your red the same as my red?”, and the knowledge argument.
• Jules also lists a second video about Monet’s ultraviolet eye: sZ8yMYvHc5E.