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YourNeverThere:
What you are talking about is one of the big questions in philosophy. It is generally believed that we can't know what is real. Why? Because we are simply receiving external stimuli that are filtered through our senses, like you said. But what caused them? All we know are their effects on us, and we rationalize them in a way that is consistent to us. But we can't know if what we perceived is the actual fact about the thing we are perceiving.
Another problem that is similar, is that since each of us has our own perception, how do we know that we are experiencing the same thing as someone else? For example, when I see red, I know what that color is. But what if what someone else perceived as red, looked green to me, if I could see their perception. Does this make a difference when we speak? we both agree that what we see is red, but we are perceiving something completely different from each other, but have both given our separate experiences the same label. So we can speak about these things to each other. Does it make a difference if we all perceive things differently, as long as we can all refer to things in a way that makes sense to us?
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