As mentioned in The Illusion of the Senses, if you first touch something cold and then touch something lukewarm, you will feel the latter is hot; if you first touch something hot and then touch something lukewarm, you will instead feel the latter is cold. This is the differential illusion of the senses. There are many such examples, such as brightness and darkness, loudness and quietness, fragrance and stench, and even physical pain and pleasure.
What about more abstract concepts like joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness, good and evil? They are actually the same. Comparison and difference can generate meaning, evoking various feelings within the mind, and the meaning and feelings aroused by these differences are also relative and have no basis in reality; they are entirely your own renderings. For example:
- Someone made a 30% profit in the stock market within a month; he was very happy and reluctant to sell. But one day when his stocks dropped by 10%, he became unhappy; he forgot that he was still up 20%, and the joy of initially making 30% instantly vanished without a trace.
- A person was hiking and accidentally fell into a valley. Fortunately, he only suffered minor scrapes. He felt lucky because of this, but looking around, there was nothing, and the slopes were too steep to climb. He shouted for a long time, but no other hikers discovered him. Thus, he had to stay in the valley, surviving by drinking spring water dripping from the rock walls and chewing on wild grass roots. Three days later, a rescue team found him, hoisted him out, and gave him a bottle of mineral water. He took his first sip and felt it was simply sweet dew! Afterward, he returned to his normal life, but no beautifully packaged water he drank later ever tasted as good as that sip of mineral water.
- A person worked in a factory where the work environment was filled with the operating noise of machinery and loud human voices. He concentrated on operating his machine and didn't find it noisy. When he returned home, crossed his legs, and watched TV, the faint sound of children playing next door immediately caught his attention. Then, the more he paid attention, the more obvious the sound became, and he began to feel irritable, having a strong urge to go and knock on his neighbor's door.
- The sense of beauty is not entirely the same across different eras, different countries, or even different individuals. In 17th-century Europe, beauties were plump, whereas modern beauties are slender. If a 17th-century European beauty were brought to the modern era, the adoration she once enjoyed might instantly turn into disdain for being overweight.
The reference point of meaning is not even fixed. For example, you score 90 on a test, and you are very happy, feeling that based on past grades, this is a high score. Subsequently, the teacher announces that the average score for this test is 98, and your high score and happiness instantly vanish without a trace. When you instantly change the reference point, your meaning completely shifts.
Every individual evaluates this world from their own unique position and perspective. For the same world, the "meanings" among different individuals are never entirely the same and can even be opposite. Even when you change your mindset or perspective, the meaning flips. And if you were the only person left in the whole world, losing all objects of comparison, all your meanings would vanish into thin air.
In other words, your inner mind is constantly and silently performing meaning rendering: the inner mind automatically and quietly sets a reference point, compares the current situation with that reference point, derives a psychological difference, and paints this fictional difference with emotional colors. The whole process is so smooth that you are completely oblivious to it, to the point that you will firmly believe your feelings are direct reactions to objective external facts. But actually, you are living in a web of illusory meanings constructed from relative differences rendered by yourself.
Finally, your numerous "meanings" do not exist in the so-called "objective" 𝕆-universe ; they only exist in your head, in the 𝕀-world. It is the "evaluation" and "re-creation" of the various impressions of sound and light collected by your senses. Unlike qualia such as loudness and quietness, brightness and darkness, which at least have air molecule vibrations and electromagnetic waves as references, "meaning" has no foothold whatsoever in the 𝕆-world. It only stands upon your various subjective sensory illusions of sound, light, fragrance, and stench. "Meaning" is an illusion within an illusion.