Sunday, February 22, 2009
the eye and the mind...
i found this qoute a while ago "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend" , do you think that it's true. If so then are we resricting our knowledge because we simply don't believe in the existence of something. Could we see fairies if we wanted to, what then isthe difference between a day dream and what actually is?
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9 comments:
Ramicoot,
You could get into some serious philosophical questions here!
In terms of the various areas of knowledge, we could characterize this dilemma as a dialogue between information and theory. We could argue that, in science for example, we need data in order to formulate theories, but it has been convincingly argued that our theories influence the data that we seek. One could say the same thing about history in terms of sources and interpretations. It seems there is an interplay between these two things.
One troubling implication of this is that perhaps our knowledge is fatally compromised by our prior beliefs, and thus objectivity is an illusion.
How would you argue that this is not the case?
To be honest i do believe that objectivity is an illusion, but to argue against my view I would say that to be objective one has to first of all be aware of the bias and make a conscious effort to ignore it. When conducting experiments, look out for every detail...but the problem is that expectation will stop you from seeing stuff. We talked about that as a problem of observation.
Honestly I belive that very little can be done, though one could lie to oneself that you are being objective.....
Ramicoot,
It's good to look for counter-claims in TOK. In fact, that's an essential skill.
Just two things for now - it's getting late (for me at least):
(1) Check out Theodore Roszak on this topic - a favourite quote of mine from him is something like "we live off the surface of ideas, harvesting facts from their surface" - nice metaphor!
(2) think about the most "objective" knowledge you can imagine - perhaps in mathematics. Is such knowledge still "biased" or compromised by subjectivity? If so, explain how. If not, can we extrapolate from that to other types of objective knowledge...?
OK ..umm when you think of maths them there is some objectivity, perhaps because it doesn't really use data obtained from things like sense perception, but most other areas of knowledge have their information based partly on sense perceived data which introduces the bias...
That's a good answer. But only some objectivity in mathematics? Is there still a problem here?
Following on from your comment on sense perception, I suppose the next question is to ask how areas of knowledge such as the natural and human sciences cope with the inevitable problems associated with empirical data. I think this has been discussed in class (emphasis on falsifiable hypotheses, replicating experiments, minimizing uncontrolled variables, employing mathematics and quantification, pinning down the meanings of words, placing findings in the public domain, etc.).
In TOK, we need to locate the problems of knowledge (and you've identified an important one), but also balance this against the strengths of knowledge and the dogged attempts of scholars to overcome the problems. I think it is very important here to acknowledge just how successful many of the scientific disciplines have been. It's quite astonishing how much we really do know about the natural and human worlds despite the limitations of our sense perception and our tendency toward "confirmation bias" - the ways in which we gravitate towards the conclusions that we hoped for or expected in the first place. That takes us back towards your original quotation...
Oh my God Rami are you serious!!!lol!
Anyway, that having been said. i don't think that we can be certain of objectivity in Math, at least not all the time because even if, in terms of the 'body of maths itself' information is not gained by perception, in its foundations...i think one could have a number of questions
About the original quote "The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend" i think it does hold quite a significant amount of truth. i have a hypothesis, well maybe its not just me....no ideas seem to be novel these days but anyway...yea i think that when we are born we see things more as they are (though we may not understand them) eventually we stop seeing some things either because we fail to understand them or because their relevance to our lives seem to wane....(babies look a lot more excited by our world than we do if you notice.) Its almost like as we grow we wean out images that we don't find 'important' for whatever reason until we have very limited perception. Perception that is limited to what we can understand. Love the quote.
Cyanide,
You said:
"...even if, in terms of the 'body of maths itself' information is not gained by perception, in its foundations...i think one could have a number of questions"
By foundations here, we may be talking about axioms - the unproved mathematical statements upon which proofs and theorems are built. Indeed there are different sets of axioms from which to start out in certain areas of mathematics, and possibly (just possibly!) this could be thought of as subjectivity "through the back door". There will be more on this when we get to discuss mathematics in class.
Your idea of noticing less and less as we get older is interesting. I wonder if this is a particularly human type of what biologists sometimes call "habituation" - the way organisms often stop responding to repeated stimuli because their repetition is a sort of indication that they are not important.
Maybe we are talking about two different things - you about what we perceive and me about how things behave, but I think there has to be a relationship between the two...
ramicoot,
in relation to your question, i remember watching a documentary over the holidays about the brain and how it works. some scientists conducted an experiment with the aim of trying to figure out if when the left frontal lobe was dominant, the human brain beahved diffently from when the right frontal lobe was dominant. for the experiment, the sat a man down behind a computer screen and asked him to read exactly what he saw. the sentence said " the horse jumped over the fence". this sentence was repeated on the screen about 30 times. then the sentence changed to " the horse jumped over the the fence" but the man was still reading it as " the horse jumped over the fence"! i am under the impression that humans automatically assume that if something is the way it was, it will stay as that the whole time, without reasoning. he subconciously made the extra "the" disappear because that was not what he read originally. what do you think?
i think this is the essence of having an open mind ramicoot. if we open our minds to seeing beyond our expectations and our limited knowledge, we are likely to discover a whole new world!!!!!!!
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