Saturday, April 2, 2011

Reality and Skepticism

Today, my friend was talking about how she is getting laser eye surgery soon, and how after the surgery she will see halos around light because her eyes will be so dilated. This made me think about how we view reality. It is funny that some things we see and think "this is reality", and some things we see, and without question think "this isn't real".  A good example is the haloes that my friend will see. She will see the light coming from a lamp and think that it is real, but the haloes of color around the light are just an aspect of her dilated eyes and not real. But, this is a deceiving idea of reality, even though it is one that is commonly held. If we look at something blue, the light reflecting off of it hits our eyes, and our brains interpret those light waves as the color blue. But really, that something is emitting a ton of light waves that we can't see at all. So, if we could see the object in reality, it would look a lot different than the interpretation our mind makes for it. This is true of all color, because all color is is our mind attempting to interpret a short spectrum of light that bounces off of objects. If not constrained by our minds and eyes, reality would look a lot different than what we see.
So, to think that we are directly seeing reality is naive, because we are only seeing our mental interpretation of reality. We take our perception of our senses, and view it as reality, when really it is just our perception. It  makes sense that we think we are seeing and interacting with reality, because it is all we can possibly know. If we can't trust our senses, we can't know anything about the world, and if we can't know anything about the world, we can't successfully interact with it. But, since the only 'view' of reality we get is through our sense perceptions, it seems like we need to have a way to verify that our perceptions are accurate in order to justifiably believe that we are seeing anything that even closely resembles reality. But the only way to test our senses is through other senses. I can go to a doctor and take a hearing test, but i only 'know' the doctor exists by seeing him, hearing him, maybe smelling or feeling him. Aka, I only 'know' the doctor exists because I am trusting my senses. So the doctor can't verify that my senses are working because i need verification of my senses in order to verify that the doctor is real.
Basically what this leads to is the realization that senses can't verify senses. Coupled with the fact that the only way we have to verify anything is through our senses, and we get the conclusion that our only means of verification of reality is unverifiable. Therefore, we aren't justified in believing our senses, because we can't verify them. And since our senses are our means of justifying every single other belief we had about reality, we aren't justified in believing anything at all about reality. So, when you see that light and the halo around it, you can say the halo isn't real, its just my eyes, but you should also say the light isn't necessarily real, and neither is the light post it's coming from, or the ground it is sitting on, or the body that this thought is coming from. 

9 comments:

  1. Reality is how we perceive it. I think one of the cooler ways that it's been explored is through SIlent Hill 3 actually. Nice post though.

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  2. That or you could use a scientific method to interpret reality.

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  3. Agreed with Joel. Reality is simply our own perception and take on the world around us.

    I really enjoyed this read. :D

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  4. Great read mate, very interesting as always.

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  5. http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/09/04/colour-is-it-in-the-brain/ You should read this blog article on whether color is all in the brain.

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  6. wow, very great!

    Keep up the great work :)

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  7. Interesting read. As said by the above people, reality is how we perceive things.

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