Theory of Knowledge: perceptions. To what extent do our senses give us knowledge of the world as it really is?

Their disadvantage is that what they memorize is no use to them. They store it in their brain, until new information is memorized; slowly causing old memory to simply be forgotten, therefore, in such cases, knowledge for perceiving the world around them is really only at a very low level.

Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, once said that revealing our senses to perceive the world around us will never happen, rather we would only gain a poor copy of it. Personally, I agree.

We cannot perceive and understand everything around us, we can only interpret things in a certain way, most probably the way they suit us best. Each person perceives things differently and reasons it as close as possible to their reality as they can.

A method known as conditioning had been invented in psychology, where a certain number of similar people would be conditions in a way to do certain things, or act in a certain way.

Conditioning a person to perceive or see things plays a role on how the world interprets data and what they would gain from it.

A class experiment we once did proved this. Mr. Nelson told us to focus on a white team, who were mingled among a black team. We had to focus on the white team and how many times a ball would be passed between them. Being conditioned to do this, our brains narrowed its focus on the purpose of us watching the video. Because of us being concentrated on the white team and a ball going round, we didn’t see a person, dressed like a gorilla, come into the middle of the screen and perform a funny dance.  Our minds we focused on what we were told to do, ignoring all and everything happening around. Therefore, this tells us that what knowledge we gain depends on how we condition our senses to perceive the world around us.

Relying on our senses above all would not be something I would recommend with certainty. Limitations are part of our sense perception just like in everything else. Some people perceive things, process them in their minds and when repeated, say something completely different. Each person interprets raw data differently, based on their culture, beliefs, intuition, and history, consequently outcomes result over a range of many different ideas.

Other ways of knowing such as logic, acquaintance, experience, empathy and introspection are also able to cause sense perceptions to alter what we actually see, hear, feel..etc…

Testing different ice creams in class, showed us that using our previous experiences and our logic of how each would taste were good enough reasons to get us close to correct answers.

Logically, our senses would never be able to gives us knowledge of how the world really is and how it functions.

Behind every pebble and every crust of dry paint lies a story it would take years to discover. Everything on Earth has a literal meaning, however how we interpret and connect this meaning with out surroundings and experiences differ for everyone.

Our perceptions of things are what we want them to be, too often not what they really are, that is why we often disagree in many fields of life.

Thus, to make this short, I do believe that knowledge we gain from around us, is perceived by our minds to fit our situation and state of consciousness. Our senses will always absorb raw data, how and they way in which we will use and interpret it will depend on each individual and their circumstance, so I would say that how much we rely on our senses would depend on how much we know about every little corner on planet Earth.