I have been reading about Heraclitus on the greatest philosophy site, stanford.edu's philosophy encyclopedia, and Heraclitus pretty much has the stance that nothing we experience is inherent in the universe we live in. For instance, he takes the stance that regardless of if the wind itself is cold or hot, one person might experience the wind hot, and the other person experiences the wind as cold. Now this seems to make a lot of sense to me, as everything has no inherent properties, but then I started thinking about the dimensions. There are generally four dimensions that occur in our existence, not including geometry that we haven't quantified yet in our subatomic physics, and those dimensions are: charge, mass, time, and length. Anyways, I have come to the conclusion that everything we experience in quality and quantity comes from these four dimensions, but I'm having a hard time reconciling this with the notion that there are only appearances and no inherent qualities to anything. However, I do know that all of the dimensions are relative to their own qualities, such as there having to be at least three objects moving in space relative to one another in order to quantify length and time that isn't purely relative and somewhat objective. What are your opinions on this?

No man stands in the same river twice.

Heraclitus also argued that Homer should be flogged and the wisdom of Pythagoras was "evil trickery".

Though I do agree that all things are in a perpetual state of flux.

"Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow." - Heraclitus

I like Heraclitus' original writing on that:

On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow.

If you read the explanation of this, it's mind blowing. I love it.

..." Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. "

Cigars smell so friggin' good. If only they weren't so expensive for good ones.

The wrapper of perception we put onto sensation seems to match pretty well from person to person, even with those that have been separate from society. I'm not sure we could ever know if we were experiencing the inherent nature of things (and thus I have no idea how you can be sure there are none), but we can at least (mostly) corroborate similar perception of at the very least the common veneer of the things we experience.

Ah. Well, there's a lot of perception that is different in many people, for instance, schizophrenics, schizoid people, bipolar, chronically depressed, male brains, female brains, etc. I don't really see how we could determine what is perceived as 'correct' and what is not percieved as 'correct', as you said you are not sure how we can know if perception is inherent or not. I believe that perception is not perceiving the inherent nature mainly because of Buddhist philosophy. Nothing in itself is separate from another, there is no really independent existing thing that exists apart from everything else, and everything we perceive is simply emptiness and appearance interacting through our human biology in order to create the reality we experience. Case in point: A bee would certainly see everything completely differently from a human. You are only looking at humans. A bee can see flowers in the ultraviolet range (i think), and so they see the colors of a flower's petals completely differently. Any sentient being with different biology would perceive everything differently in their own special way. So that is one reason why I believe that there is no inherent quality to perception. But at the same time, if there is no inherent quality to perception, then where do we experience the quality from? For instance, the qualia of sight, id est, colors, must derive from the object we're looking at, but then at the same time, nothing in the object we're looking at has this color in it, philosophically speaking. So, somehow, qualities must either be inherent in our universe, and each being interprets them in different ways, or it simply appears out of no where.

So you're basically saying that all experience is subjective?

Well, not necessarily in a subject-object dichotomy, but rather a sort of mixture of object and subject that creates a reality that is fundamentally different from all other species' own perceptions. I don't like using the notion of subject or object at all, I tend to see it in a way that is focused on there being no inherent quality in what most would call the object, and a diaphanous appearing to the subject, and then a biology that is intermediate between the two that creates the reality, such as for humans, which I call otherwise the Logos or Anthropos, that is an interface between the subject and object parts of perception.