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  • Essay / In contact with the five senses: truth or deception

    The world we live in is so immense and it is up to us to discover it. We are born with a set of tools to touch, feel, see, hear, taste and smell the world around us, but are these tools enough to adequately map the reality we live in? Do our senses tell us the truth? People developed their knowledge of the world by exercising their senses. The reason the sky is blue is because our eyes see it as blue. The reason we know honey is sweet is because we've tasted it before. It is difficult for us to accept the idea that our senses are deceiving us because we rely solely on them to move us around and gain knowledge about everything around us. But if the senses sometimes deceive us, does that mean we can't know anything? To further determine whether or not our senses are deceiving us, we must examine their origin. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The five senses work the way they do by design, and the creator, God, has given us the perfect set of tools to explore and understand a touch of the world around us. As Descartes questions in his first meditation, “if God is supremely good and the source of truth,” how is it possible that his creation turns out to be an erroneous and deceptive creation? We used our eyes to identify the colors around us, our ears to distinguish our mother's voice from our grandmother's, and our nose to appreciate the scent of a rose. All of these senses have helped us map the world around us and familiarize ourselves with its works of art, making it not difficult, but impossible, for us to deny the fact that our senses report something other than the truth. However, looking at the idea from a different perspective shows us that our senses are simple receptors that have no filters or identifiers for what is actually there. For example, a color blind person perceives the color green as yellow and therefore looks at the world from a completely different perspective. In the same sense, blind people have enhanced hearing abilities, so they perceive sounds and vibrations much more rigorously than normal people. Descartes expresses this through a wonderful example where he considers a piece of wax. The honeycomb, as he describes it, tastes like honey, retains the scent of flowers, has a golden color, is made up of hexagonal-shaped rays, and has a certain texture to the touch. All of these attributes are picked up by our senses, helping us identify this piece of wax as a honeycomb. Descartes then explains how, if he puts the wax near the fire, the taste disappears, the smell disappears, the color changes, the shape of the combs distorts, and the once solid wax becomes liquid. Thus, according to our senses, it no longer identifies with a bee's nest based on its current attributes, but the wax remains. This brings us to our second point, which seeks to determine whether the body and mind are related in any way, and a major question arises here, namely: Would Descartes have recognized the radius of honey if he just stared at the melted wax without knowing it. its previous form? Let us return to the previous example of the wax before and after putting it next to the fire; the senses simply translated it to identify it as a honeycomb. However, did Descartes' senses actually identify him as a honeycomb after his fusion, and even after his attributes were completely altered, or was it his brain? In this sense, his brain learned that this wax was once a.?