Perception and Reality

Avicenna's works we read were wordy and certainly not what we're used to reading (especially as artists; not regularly exposed to scientific writings by education or trade). On my second time around I got the overall vibe that the scientific discussion Avicenna was working out, in both On Vision and On Nature, was centered around the relationship between our perception of reality and reality itself and the dissonance between the two. Naturally several questions come to mind: Does what we see really exist? What things in existence don't we see? How would we be able to measure the existence/non-existence of any thing? How can we manipulate what we see or perhaps even it's existence?

I'm currently in a workshop entitled "Hyperspace". The premise of the class is the marriage between science and art (specifically quantum mechanics and sculpture/drawing). In class today we were discussing an excerpt of Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, which describes the four known forces of the universe. We tangented off into discussing perception and the fact that humans are the least perceptive of all animals; all we can visually/physically acknowledge is a very small sliver of the entire (or what we know of) spectrum of known reality. We are aware, and make use of, such invisible things as radio-waves, microwaves, radiation, etc. Quantum mechanics itself is basically a theoretical science of the unseen and practically unmeasurable. Crazy world, huh?