Daphne Sakellariou Block 4 November 2006 TOK
To start with, using our senses many possibilities for knowledge are opened to us. Our senses have some limitations that prevent us from our knowledge. But what is knowledge? Generally, knowledge is a term that a lot of people accept when they want to say that they know something. More specifically, knowledge for me is when I can not only know something, but when I can understand something. Knowledge is when I can answer the question “why?” or “so what?”. Also, I can understand the word “knowledge” as a way how I perceive the world around me. My senses help me to have “knowledge”. But what are “senses”?. Every person has almost five senses. These are touching, hearing, smelling, sight and tasting. But there are many people who support the opinion that they have the sixth sense. This sense is about having some views or dreams. Many other people believe that this sense does not exist. Unfortunately, there are some people who are blind or deaf. That means that they don’t have a sense of all these five. Using the word “sense” I mean the ability that people have to understand and perceive the world around them.
So, understanding all these possibilities for knowledge that are opened to us by our senses are numerous. Using our senses, we can learn, understand and the most importantly, we perceive how the world around us looks. So senses are a way to “see” our world. This has as a result to learn our world. Using or sense of sight we can understand if something is beautiful or we can see the color that something has. Using our sense of hearing we can understand if we like something using a different way. For example, we can listen to music and we can understand it. But also with this sense we can understand a lot other things. We can listen to music and understand that we are threatened or we can hear a “suspicious” noise and we understand this. With our sense of touch we can “see” in our mind the shape of an object. And with tasting we can understand if we like something or not. As we all can understand our senses help us to learn our world and to perceive the things around us.
In my opinion, everything that we know is knowledge and knowledge is a result of how we combine our senses. So, the possibilities for knowledge are all opened to us if we use our senses. A good example for this is that nevertheless some people don’t have all of their senses, they still can perceive their world and they have many possibilities for knowledge, too. So, we can “see” that every possibility for knowledge is opened to us, but whether we finally have knowledge, depends on how we use our senses.
According to my opinion, our senses have some limitations. Unfortunately, we can see whatever we want to. I think that this is a very important disadvantage for us. Our senses are the “servants” of our beliefs, so we can perceive whatever we believe that there is. Except of this, our senses have the limit that they can not “see” whatever we would like to “see”. For example, we perceive every day that the earth is flat, but sciences have improved that the earth is round. We perceive this because our senses have limitations that “allow” us to perceive this. In addition, our culture, our social environment and our beliefs are other obstacles of how we perceive our world. Also, the video that we saw in class with the basketball teams helps us to understand this. There was a big gorilla in the video, but we could not see it because we observe the match. Another limitation of our senses is that we are objective in some things and we cannot perceive our real world. In addition, how sure we are that there are not things that we cannot perceive them using our senses? Personally, I am not sure, maybe there are a lot of things that I cannot perceive. Maybe I don’t allow to my senses to perceive some things.
There is another side of this opinion. Many people believe that everything we can perceive exist and nothing else. They believe that our senses have no limits and also that our mind and our objective have nothing to do with what we see, smell, touch, hear or taste.
In conclusion, my point is that we have a lot of possibilities for knowledge if we use our senses. If we can combine them we can discover our world and we can understand and perceive everything around us. I believe that the most important thing is to be open-minded and to accept every challenge in our life in order to understand our world better. At the end, I support the opinion that if we really want to, we can also “delete” every imitation of them.