2. When should we trust our senses to give us the truth?
TOK Essay
Heikki Suomalainen
Candidate Number:000679-043
Word Count: 1200
Human race has been granted many fabulous senses. To what extent can we trust these senses and
more importantly when can we trust them. In some situations these senses can prove to lifesaving
and in other they might prove to be fatal in most serious fashion. Let us expand our views on the
topic by using common everyday situations as inspiring examples.
First of all we should take a look what is truth. Truth is a rather common word used in
every day language yet its specific definition is rather elusive. Let’s take a simple every day
example. You see little Tim during your school day. You did not see little Tim during morning
lessons and you enquire whether he was skipping the morning lesson or not. Tim responds to you as
follows: “It’s true that I skipped the morning lesson.” Initially this would seem rather simple
statement. You did not see little Tim attending class and he even told you himself that he was
skipping. So is it true that Tim was skipping? In everyday life you could leave it at that and accept it
as a truth that little Tim really was skipping. But since this is TOK essay there is NO way we can
leave it at that. In order for little Tim’s statement to be true there should be some sort of universal
laws defining the terms used in the sentence. Who defines what skipping means? We can take the
used language, English in this case since it is the brutally enforced language in the study system this
essay is part of, as our vocal point in defining what skipping means. Since English speakers are
bound together by the history of all the other English speakers before them, there exists a general
consensus what ‘skipping’ means, but then again language is by my definition a dynamic system of
rules and definitions that are subjective in their fundamental nature. And because of this subjectivity
and constant evolution of language it is impossible to set ultimate definitions to anything. The same
activity little Tim defines as ‘skipping’, might be named in my set of definitions ‘creative free-time’
or maybe ‘involuntary recession of work moral’. To sum it up: Every person defines their own
meanings for words and we are only able to arrive to some sort of approximation of the meaning the
other participant of communication is trying to convey to us. And because of this uncertainty
language can not ultimately define what truth is.
Human senses are rather inaccurate. For example our eyesight can only provide us
with very general information of our surroundings. These outside stimuli are then interpreted by our
mind and then we arrive into some sort of conscious understanding of the situation. These
interpretations can be affected by many different factors. Are we sleepy? Are we in a bad mood?
Have we consumed any hallucinatory inducing products? Furthermore different sort of shapes and
colours can distract our perception abilities and we might see something that is really not there. For
example a spiral drawn in a special way with certain colour combinations might possibly make us
believe that a stationary image is actually moving. Simple optic illusion and yet makes our twist and
makes us unsure what really is in front of us. We live on daily basis supported by our senses that are
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inaccurate, gullible and limited. Simple question: Why? The answer is simple; we do not have any
other choice. All the information we have is gathered through our senses. If we would not rely on
our senses we would have nothing.
Trust is another rather elusive topic. It is a peculiar human trait that is in many cases
based on emotional judgement rather than rigorous logical assessment. Many children trust their
parents because they have always done so and think nothing of it. This is of course very handy since
without certain level of trust it would be rather hard to maintain the kind of social infrastructure that
humans are using. But on individual level blindly trusting every other individual yields the person
prone to be abused in one way or another. Even though majority of people would be worth the trust
given to you only need one person not worth trusting to soon find yourself lying in a ditch with a
bloody knife struck between your liver and lungs. But as said every human interaction requires
some level of trust, if it is not there you cannot even communicate with the person in question. To
asses whether you can trust someone or not you need to asses the given situation with very limited
knowledge. Let’s say you are walking down the street and you meet a person named Heli. Heli
points her finger behind you and says: “Look out, that truck is going to drive you over.” You do not
know that much about this individual named Heli, you have met her once or twice nothing more.
The situation is new you in a sense that you have never witnessed a situation where a truck was
going to hit a person. So you have very limited information of the situation and you basically have
two choices. You either trust Heli and make a daring dodge towards the ditch on the side of the road
and ruin your new coat and possible receive hearty laugh from Heli as she laughs to your gullible
nature. Or then you choose to ignore Heli and risk getting your charming persona ripped apart by
charging whirlwind of doom made out of metal and screaming rubber tires singing you funeral
march. Whatever your decision may be you are going to make it in an instant based on very limited
and questionable information. That is the essence of trusting something. Usually you base it in
intuition in order to be able to make some sort of decisions instead of freezing up and getting
pummelled by that truck for example.
So when should we trust our senses to give us the truth? Taking a look at the previous
truck example I believe the right answer is that always when we have no other way of verifying the
information. Since senses are all that we have in most of the cases this means that we should trust
our senses majority of the time. For example if we see a psychotic TOK-teacher who has snapped
under the constant pressure and whose world view has been wrecked by students who in their
laziness fail to realise the full potential of their astounding intellect charging you with a bloody axe,
you most likely are not going start gathering observation data from people and calculating statistical
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significance of the results. First of all it would severely impair the potential reaction of the
participant most likely leading to an early death.
In conclusion it can be easily argued that although human senses are mostly relevant
in everyday life, their use in all of the situations that concern high level decision making is
elementally flawed. This is due to the implied fact that human senses are prone to misinterpretation
and they easily produce false information, in relation to the concept of truth defined earlier.
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