We have eyes to see with, ears to hear with, why then do we err?
We have been blessed with five senses that we are expected to survive with. But as technologies improve and our knowledge is broadened, the more we realize that our senses are not as glorious as previously thought. Indeed, man has been blessed with eyes and ears, yet he still errs. What he sees before him, is it correct? What he hears and what he is told, is it inaccurate?
Our perception of our world has been shaped by centuries worth of studies, and recently with the help of technology. We believe what we see in textbooks, we nod in agreement to what we are told. This computer before me, why is it called a computer? How is it made? Why was it made? It is called a computer because that is what Konrad Zuse decided to call it. It is made with the help of other technology, and it was made to help with research. I am able to answer these questions because I believe what I read in a textbook and I believed what I was told. Yet similarly to how a computer often errs, humans err in their understanding of the universe.
It is well known that our world is strange and perplexing. Despite a huge growth of knowledge in recent decades, we are still confronted by an enormous array of ambivalent beliefs. Many years ago, it was believed that the world was flat. The sailors setting out to sea were not looking at the whole picture, and therefore made errors in judgment. Millions of people read the world was flat, they heard the world was flat, and they believed in it with all their heart. But they turned out to be false. The human brain, said to be the most powerful and complex thinking tool in the world, deceived them.
What we see or hear is immediately processed b...
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...rs of memorizing, hearing, and seeing have made my brain believe that two dots can only be the same color if they look exactly the same, disregarding any other variables. This is a major error in my understanding of even a simple thing like colors.
Our ears and eyes have the possibility of deceiving us and making us have a lapse in judgment. What we hear and what we are told, what we read and what we see have the possibility of being incorrect. Whether we realize it or not, the universe around us is much more complex than we give it credit for. Our vision and hearing is simply not excelled enough to keep up with the fast moving world. If we can understand and accept the fact that we err, we can use what we know as a foundation for further research, always keeping in mind that what we think we know is not set in stone.
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In Stephen Jay Gould’s essay, “Some close encounters of a mental kind,” Gould discussed about how certainty can be both blessing and dangerous. According to Gould, certainty can be blessing because it can provide warmth, comfort and secure. However, it can also be a danger because it can trick our mind with false information of what we see and remember in our mind. Gould also talked about the three levels of possible error in direct visual observation: misperception, retention and retrieval. According to Gould, our human mind is the greatest miracle of nature and the wicked of all frauds and tricksters mixed. To support his argument and statements, he used an example of an experiment that Elizabeth Loftus, a professor from University of California Irvine, did to her students and a personal experience of his childhood trip to the Devils Tower. I agree with Gould that sight and memory do not provide certainty because what we remember is not always true, our mind can be tricky and trick us into believing what we see/hear is real due to the three potential error of visual observation. Certainty is unreliable and tricky.
Our five senses –sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch help the ways in which we perceive the world around us. And while they seem to work independently at time they can effect each other and the way we comprehend something. Seeing something pretty, touching something soft, eating something cold and smelling something rotten are the sense we use to connect with the world around us and will all effect how we move forward in that situation. When you look at the top picture say the color of the word not the word itself. It is harder than it seems and takes a little practice to do it efficiently. It is because we see the spelling we were taught not the color it was written in. It is hard to process it the other way, but not impossible. Take the bottom picture for another example is this a
Human beings’ belief systems don’t always work according to evidence. Belief is made up of
Since most people get their truth through the senses, human nature is uncertain because the senses sometimes are unreliable. The senses are deceptive especially when our experiences are just dreams, not sense perceptions. The “dream argument” by Descartes is a perfect example. What happened in the “Dream argument” is that the Mediator dreamed of clothing in dress gown, but the reality is that he was actually undressed in bed. The only way of knowing the truth is by waking up because it is very difficult to differentiate a dream moment from a waking moment when asleep. The idea of experiencing real things in our dreams, while we actually aren’t is the reason why our senses deceive. Watching the sunrise and sunset is another good example of sense deception. When we see sunrise and sunset, it seems like the sun is moving. I assume that the sun moves because I can see it
Humans are always reluctant to figure out new information and for this we have had centuries of incredible thinkers, artists, and musicians come about. Some have come across new findings by accident and others have worked their entire lives to figure out something to be remembered by. What makes human beings so distinguishable from other species is we have the ability to think and feel and with this we can act in a way that makes us a superior species. With this kind of view on the world we as humans are subjective to our surroundings and build a system of belief through our experiences. While human beings are all destined to be great at birth, the desire to know who we are, why we behave the way we do, what our nature is, and explaining the
Despite the detail and thought that went into both Pereboom and Kanes’ work, the debate of free will is nowhere near being settled. Regardless, it is the possible ideas and theories such as these that allow us to explore and understand the concepts that make up our universe.
totally reliable we then have to look at what we know of without our senses. Descartes says that the only thing
The earth is flat. Who, but a government tool, has truly seen the spherical world? The human race should not be content to sit and accept what is broadcasted to the masses. A foul conspiracy to gain power and money keeps us in the dark, and unless the truth is thrust into common knowledge, society will continue to be controlled by scheming New World Leaders. Flat earth is the truth, and lies of science and government perpetuate the myth of a spherical earth.
Six hundred years ago western culture adopted the general scientific model as an unproven assumed perspective. The general scientific model developed as a phenomenon of knowledge that could be tested and replicated by all. The general scientific model presents a foundation of perception upon which theories, assumptions, and most beliefs are based off. Only confined by human limitations, the general scientific model is perceived to have endless possibilities of achievable knowledge. According to the general scientific model there are simply four basic assumptions that base the key to all knowledge: every event has a cause, causes can be known, humans can discover the causes of events, and ignorance of causes is due to improper tools (Portko,
The question as Bultmann argues is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express people’s understanding in the world in which they live in. In other words, to delve into the reasoning of humanity’s existence and purpose. While it is prudent to consider Bultmann’s thoughts concerning the language of the New Testament, his suggestion may not be the only
Perception is defined as the awareness of the world through the use of the five senses, but the concept of perception is often used to isolate one person’s point of view, so how reliable can perception be if no one person’s is exactly the same? The word perception itself is riddled with different, well, perceptions of its meaning. When some hear the word they might automatically think of it as something innately flawed, that can easily be fooled by illusions, while others may think of its usefulness when avoiding scalding a hand on a hot stove. I am here to agree with both and to argue that perception is something necessary and helpful, and something that should be scrutinized for its flaws. By looking at perception as a way of knowing in the
Thus, in our search to understand that which is intangible, we come to realize that the definitions that we seek are further than meets the eye. For although many may say they understand what is and is not real, they often rely on a surface level of understanding. Yet when the curious seek out a deeper grasp of the words real, surreal, and reality, many would discover that they are, in fact, unsolvable. Thus we will never know the ultimate truth, we only can get closer and closer to
Up until the Enlightenment, mankind lived under the notion that religion, moreover intelligent design, was most likely the only explanation for the existence of life. However, people’s faith in the church’s ideals and teachings began to wither with the emergence of scientific ideas that were daringly presented to the world by great minds including Galileo and Darwin. The actuality that there was more to how and why we exist, besides just having an all-powerful creator, began to interest the curious minds in society. Thus, science began to emerge as an alternative and/or supplement to religion for some. Science provided a more analytical view of the world we see while religion was based more upon human tradition/faith and the more metaphysical world we don’t necessarily see. Today science may come across as having more solid evidence and grounding than religion because of scientific data that provides a seemingly more detailed overview of life’s complexity. “Einstein once said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible” (Polkinghorne, 62). Yet, we can still use theories and ideas from both, similar to Ian Barbour’s Dialouge and Integration models, to help us formulate an even more thorough concept of the universe using a human and religious perspective in addition to scientific data.
Senses merely hinder and obscure the truth. Sight for example can be fooled easily with optical illusions
Since the dawn of intelligent man, humanity has speculated about the origins of the universe.