To What Extent Do Our Senses Give Us Knowledge of the World as It Really Is?

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Angela Mandalios TOK Nov. 2006 To what extent do our senses give us knowledge of the world as it really is? Our senses are what connect us to everything around us. Knowledge is what we learn, what we gain through experience, through culture and what we understand from different people’s interpretations. Our senses provide us with a path, which we are free to travel or reject. What we do with our senses differs from person to person, depending on their needs and abilities. People depend on their senses and the knowledge it provides them with in order to survive given circumstances. Blind and deaf people, for example, learn to deal with the senses that they have more effectively in order to cover for the ones that are missing. Naturally people deal with situations in the best way they can, provided they have the knowledge which enables them to do so. The ways of knowing, emotion, reason, language and perception, when all linked together give us a minimum idea of what really happened in the world around us. People who are missing such areas of understanding and processing in their minds often suffer complex disabilities which causes them to deal with the world around them differently. Such an example are the idiot savants, who suffer from mental disorders, however these disorders have given them on extraordinary ability to memorize things they see around them at a higher than average level. Because such people only have one cortex, unlike normal people who have a division of two sections, they miss certain brain functions which would normally trigger emotions or reason. Their single cortex however, enables them to use their memory as efficiently as possible, reaching up to 98%! Their disadvantage is that what they memorize is no use to them. They store it in their brain, until new information is memorized; slowly causing old memory to simply be

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