WEEK 2 - "Seeing and Perceiving: What is Real?"

"How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake and talking to one another in the walking state?" - Plato

This week we learned quite an interesting topic on how we thought what we're seeing as real, but in fact, are just "electric signal sent to the brain", and what we perceive as the "truth".

According to Jamieson (2007), “The light energy reaching the eye is converted into electrical discharges which are transmitted as impulses along the nervous pathways to the brain” (p. 15)


And it does not just apply to our sense of seeing, but also apply to all other four senses of our body: sense of hearing, sense of touch, sense of smell and sense of taste. A scientific research shows that everything we see, hear, smell, touch and taste are in fact, signals sent to the brain and what we perceive as "real".

During the lecture, Dr. Chris showed us a video that had unmistakably slapped us with a shockingly cold truth: So, after this while, all that we thought was real, may not be real after all?
(link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqnEGu8VF8Y&feature=related)

It was one of the few questions that Dr. Chris Woo kept on pondering upon us: how, ladies and gentlemen, do you know what's real?

It was, in fact, a very good question. Well, how do we know what's not Not real? Throughout the lecture, I was actually quite surprised on how easy people digested the "truth" conveyed by Science. What I meant is this:


1. We believe that the world around us is real because of what we see, touch, smell, hear and taste of them.
2. But, science has proven that they are merely signals sent to the brain.
3. Therefore, all that we thought were real may not be real after all.
4. However, if Science has proven that everything that we touch, smell, taste, see and hear may not be real, how did they know what they experimented are real at all?

There is one question in our tutorial work this week: How do we judge whether one person’s perception is more “true” or “false” than the other? Is it even possible? Taking the same root as this question, I applied it to the question imposed to us by Dr. Chris: How do we know what’s real? How do we prove what’s real and what’s not, when everything that we see, smell, touch, taste and hear are “signals” sent to the brain?

(Not that I mind to think that King Ape of All Apes Species little brother of mine is merely a fragment of my messed-up brain)

I thought hard of the question, and after awhile, I had finally decided that: No, there is no way for us to prove something is "real" or "fake". It was probably not even possible. So far, we can only assume what we're seeing and what we are not seeing, as either true or false.

I think this is where "faith" comes in. For all those questions that we can't seem to be having the answers, we have to accept the fact that, there is a much greater power working that is beyond our comprehension. “Faith”, as define by Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, means “firm belief; trust; complete confidence” (p. 364). It may be “nonsense”, or “rubbish” to a non-believer – but, sometimes, life is about taking a leap of faith.

References
Jamieson, H (2007). The perceptual connection. Visual communication: more than meets the eye (pp. 13-27). Bristol: Intellect Books.

Longman dictionary of Contemporary English – New Edition (1988). England: Longman Group UK Limited

Images
All images are courtesy to the following links:
http://www.star.ac.za/graphics/n11lmc_noao.jpg
http://www.cyh.com/HealthTopics/Library/eyewk-2a.gif