“We See and Understand Things Not as They Are but as We Are.”

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“We see and understand things not as they are but as we are.” The way in which we attain knowledge will determine how we understand things but no matter how we try to understand things, our knowledge will never be objective. We manipulate our knowledge into ways we can interpret them. Our interpretations are based off of past experiences, culture, biological limitations and our emotions. We use perception to “see” things and then use reasoning to process the information, but with reasoning comes emotion and that tinges our knowledge. By doing this, all our knowledge will end up as subjective; therefore we are never truly able to see things as they truly are. In essence, there is no absolute truth. Everything is in the context and the situation you look at it. Everyone is different and our experiences model our personalities and feelings therefore everyone will have a different way of acquiring knowledge and perceiving things. Things are interpreted different as people differ from opinion, perspective and most of all perception. Perception, reasoning and emotion play a big role in understanding things and manipulating the information to ways we think best and that suit our needs in life. We use perception to pick up information our surroundings and reasoning to process this information but not all information perceived is correct and what we do pick up we use reasoning to justify it. For example, from perception we see that the sun rises and sets every day. However, through discoveries we assume the truth is that the sun never rises and the Earth rotates around it but we use reasoning to manipulate the truth into a way we find best. Our perception is influenced by our biological limitations due to the fact that we can’t see what it assumed to be the truth. What society tends to do is label things and make it into our own interpretation i.e. we label what we have
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