The Senses Do Not Distort

1. If the senses distort then man is not conscious of reality;
2. man is conscious of reality;
3. therefore the senses do not distort.

Man’s sensory apparatus is valid, and has no power to distort the data confronting it. Perception is perception of existence—the senses are physical faculties of perception that respond automatically to real causal phenomena.¹

Sensory experience is a form of awareness produced by physical entities (the external stimuli) acting on physical instrumentalities (the sense organs), which respond automatically, as a link in a causally determined chain. Obeying inexorable natural laws, the organs transmit a message to the nervous system and the brain. Such organs have no power of choice, no power to invent, distort, or deceive. They do not respond to a zero, only to a something, something real, some existential object which acts on them.

The senses do not interpret their own reactions; they do not identify the objects that impinge on them. They merely respond to stimuli, thereby making us aware of the fact that some kind of objects exist. We do not become aware of what the objects are, but merely that they are. ‘The task of [man’s], senses,” writes Ayn Rand, “is to give him the evidence of existence, but the task of identifying it belongs to his reason, his senses tell him only that something is, but what it is must be learned by his mind.” It is only in regard to the “what”–only on the conceptual level of consciousness–that the possibility of error arises. If a boy sees a jolly bearded man in a red suit and infers that Santa Claus has come down from the North Pole, his senses have made no error; it is his conclusion that is mistaken.²