The Mind Is Misled

International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge

The Mind Is Misled

PHILOSOPHY

1126 words

In the following paragraphs I will present my theories and views by giving examples to persuade the reader that my thesis is valid. I will present valid arguments in order to obtain this conclusion. Can we know whether our perceptions have any connection with truth and the true nature of reality? I believe that no, we will never really know if our perceptions have any connection with truth and the true nature of reality. I will explain why I believe this is so.

First of all, in my own words this is my description of empiricism. Empiricism is that we can gain knowledge and actually become closer to the truth thru experience. What I mean is that for one person to gain knowledge about something is that they either have to interact with it solely by being there and actually touching or seeing it. Actually experiencing what’s going on around them and what you can pick up with your senses or perceptions is how we get knowledge. For example, lets say someone tells you about a rollercoaster ride, you can actually visualize and imagine by the way that person explains to you but you won’t feel the rush or feel the wind in your hair, plus how bout if that person is telling you a lie then there will be no way of getting to the truth. But on the other hand if you experience it yourself you will know the truth and you will have experienced it with all your senses so that will make you even more knowledgeable and know the truth.

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Secondary, I have explained empiricism in my own words now I will proceed to explain what rationalism is. Rationalism is the belief that you can get knowledge through reason, in other words it is that you can get knowledge by not using any of your senses but by just asking questions and reasoning. So you would have never experienced anything, but you use your mind to reason so it is more concentrated on the intellect and that is how you gain the knowledge and become closer to the truth. For example lets say someone tells you about doing a wheelie on a motorcycle that is very dangerous, he explains to you in detail how he feels and what he is doing while riding the bike. Now we reason trying to find doubts of what he is saying so we ask questions like was there any cars around or how fast were you going. In the process of reasoning you are thinking rationally trying to comprehend the truth and becoming closer to it.

Furthermore, Now that I have discussed the above in my opinion I will argue that empiricism is preferable. The reason is because rationalism is too much into asking questions and trying to rationalize what is going on for example I will give you Descartes who tries to find a foundation of thought that only has things which he believes is certain. But what happen to him is that the more you try to rationalize and ask questions the more you will give yourself a headache because the more you ask questions the more you realize not to because you will never find what is for certain or the truth.

Now empiricism on the other hand is through experience and yes you have to ask questions but no you do not have to go in so deep to find the truth. I like empiricism more because I feel they get closer to the truth than rationalist do, instead of asking and trying to reason they concentrate more on experimenting and through means to make ourselves actually experience what we are figuring out. The way we can discover truth though is something else. We have to use both disciplines I believe to discover truth. First we would use the empiricism side of thinking to experience and experiment to get a feel for what is going on first because then we get rid of the false stuff like what our mind uses called imagination. Then I think we use the rationalist side to ask questions and try to come up with certainties to just make sure that something is for certain but we can not dig in to deep like what happens to all the other rationalists. Last we leave it up to ourselves to believe what your own mind wants to believe because in actuality when you are in a dream that dream is your reality even though it is not real.

In conclusion I think we can know whether our perceptions have any connection with truth and the true nature of reality. But can we know if an external world beyond our mind exist, no and this is because no matter what we do there is always the problem that was presented in the movie the matrix that we can be living in pretty much a dream that is made by something that we don’t know about. All we can do is believe that we are living our regular day life with our real bodies. We have no way of finding out because we ourselves don’t even know if we are living in our real selves or in our false mind self that seems real so no we will never find out. Our perceptions on the other hand can open up and try to connect with reality. I say this because I think there is a way to open our mind to get closer to truth and this is by being open minded and just having the thought in the back of your mind that there is more to life than what you see. We only use a little part of our brain and we have advanced in ways that we would have never thought possible 50 years ago. I think if we can use more brain power this will open up the door to the truth. Our perceptions will be so advanced that we will see things in ways that we would have never thought possible. By using more brain power I think we will be able to even move objects with just our thought. Even though people will object and say that no this will never happen because our brain is not capable of such things I will argument that we only use a small percentage of our brain imagine what will happen if we use more of it and also you can not use this as an objection because you don’t know yourself if it would happen because the only way to know if it does happen and we experience it. Which we would use empiricism.