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.
We live in a world full of doubt and The Alchemist, a novel written by Paulo Coelho, surely grasps that concept. This is what human nature is to be cautious around the unknown and to not trust until the trust is earned, at least that is what I believe in.
A common definition of misperception theory describes it as “the gap between the world as it actually exists and the world as it exists in the mind of the perceiver” (Duelfer and Dyson, 2011). This definition is however, dependent on one crucial assumption, that there is both a single objective reality and multiple subjective realities. The key differe...
totally reliable we then have to look at what we know of without our senses. Descartes says that the only thing
What we see is not the truth, but rather our interpretation and distortion of the things we struggle to perceive. Our imagination, ideologies and perceptions fuse with our conception of reality, as we transform the world around us, give meanings to abstractions, and find order in a world programmed by madness. We are prone to madness, to nature, to the metaphorical forces that influence and envelop reality. In order to understand the metaphysical realm, we conceptualize these divine, omnipotent forces through our uses of symbols, thus creating an understandable world defined by rationality and philosophy thinking. Philosophical thinking and rationality enable us to both understand our world metaphorical and define what humanity is. These ideas
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
The claims of rationality and the so-called scientific approach of the atheists and agnostics have been debunked. In the coming pages we shall see that both in the creation of the universe, in things created within the universe and in the creation of living beings, an intelligently designed process is going on, and we shall demonstrate that the objections of agnostics and skeptics to this assertion are merely delusions.
Many times we have been in a dilemma whether to believe or not someone who tries to persuade us for something and very often by listening his arguments and by having enough evidence we finally manage to get out of the dilemma. Nevertheless sometimes we cannot be sure about an event because although there is enough evidence, our minds cannot be persuaded. An example to justify that is the existence of the Loch Ness monster, or as it is widely known “Nessie”.
I once spent a full three minutes looking for a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, ‘What color am I looking for?’ and a fellow said, ‘Green.’ When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: The thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark” (p. 695). This example illustrates how we can perceive colors differently from one another. Annie had visualized her idea of what the green bullfrog should look like, possibly from a picture she had seen in the past. The person that told her the frog was green may have meant that it was an olive green. For instance, what some might call burgundy, others would call dark red or even crimson. Furthermore, people who are colorblind have an entirely different perception of colors; depending on the degree of colorblindness, they may not be able to recognize the colors red, green, or
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 way that each individual interprets, retrieves, and responds to the information in the world that surrounds you is known as perception. It is a personal way of creating opinions about others and ourselves in everyday life and being able to recognize it under various conditions. Each person’s perceptions are used as a kind of filter that every piece of information has to pass through before it determines the effect that it has or will have on the person from the stimulus. It is convincing to believe that we create multiple perceptions about different situations and objects each day. Perceptions reflect our opinions in many ways. The quality of a person’s perceptions is very important and can affect the response that is given through different situations. Perception is often deceived as reality. “Through perception, people process information inputs into responses involving feelings and action.” (Schermerhorn, et al.; p. 3). Perception can be influenced by a person’s personality, values, or experiences which, in turn, can play little role in reality. People make sense of the world that they perceive because the visual system makes practical explanations of the information that the eyes pick up.
“Everything that enters the senses needs to be interpreted through the brain -- and these interpretations occasionally go wrong,” he said.
...t is that human reasoning abilities have allowed mankind to develop a virtual telescope far beyond the reach of our newest space viewing technologies. With this theory, humans come closer to realizing our place within the multiverse and the uniqueness of our own universe. The conflicting ideas, though difficult to prove one way or another, provide an impetus that will stimulate further research into this field, opening new doors and potentially useful technologies that could further humans’ understanding of everything on which our knowledge rests.
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