Senseless: A False Sense Of Perception Essay, Research Paper

Senseless: A False Sense of Perception

I feel as though I have no choice but to be a skeptic about our ability

to know the world on the sense experience given the information that is being

presented.

Our senses are touching, hearing, smelling and tasting, I believe it is

quite possible that a person could think they see, touch, and smell something

such as a glass of bear but there be no glass of beer present, therefore their

perception of this glass of beer is false. There is a good possibility that

this person is suffering from any of the numerous possible sensations, auditory,

visual or tactile, experienced without external stimulus and caused by mental

derangement, intoxication or fever, in other words this person could be

hallucinating.

There are many ways that the senses can be tricked into believing things

that are not true, an example is when a person takes the drug LSD, this drug is

one which alters the state of the mind and tricks it into visually perceiving

things which are not real such as pink elephants, green rats, gold skin and so

on. Hallucinations may occur when pressure is applied to different sections,

drawing different reactions from the person being affected, these reactions are

caused by the affected person seeing things which they perceive to be real .

Hallucinations are only one way by which the visual perception of an object can

be altered there are many more ways by which the visual perception of an object

can be altered; for example consider a square envelope, pay very close attention

to what you see when you look at this object. If the envelope does not move but

you do then your perception of this object will continually change as you move

about and the “square envelope” no longer looks square. Because a square object

such as an envelope can’t be square and not square at the same time then the

visual perception of the object must be false.

Another false visual perception would be a mirage, for example when you

drive down a flat stretch of highway on a hot summer day it appears as though

there are patches of water on the road up ahead, as you get closer and closer

to where the water appears to be it disappears. Another example would be

illusions with mirrors such as the ones that David Copperfield performs, in his

performances he astounds audiences by making it appear as if people are

floating on air.

In regard to the debate in section 11 of Philosophical Problems and

Arguments I tend to agree with premise one which states that we can sometimes

be mistaken in our perceptual beliefs, for example when we hallucinate we are

mistaken in our perceptual although we may not realize it at that particular

point in time. As for premise two I tend not to agree with this one, I don’t

believe that it is always logically possible that our perceptual beliefs are

false other wise we would all be hallucinating and I find it hard to grasp that

billions and billions of people are hallucinating. As for the final premise and

the conclusion I tend to believe that they are both false because they both

relay on the second premise being true.

It is said that “seeing is believing” but with hallucinations, optical

illusions and other false visual perceptions occurring without people even

realizing it, you have got to wonder who came up with the term “seeing is

believing” and how it could ever be possible that somebody would believe such a

ludicrous statement.