Author: nguye16224@gapps.uwcsea.edu.sg

Last week we read the Nacirema article which was very eye-opening and quite misleading, which was the whole point of the article. We were asked to think of a similar example of something familiar to us described to the point where it was practically unrecognizable. Initially, the first example I thought of (I had read it somewhere before) was the movie where it starts off with a scene of a big family; a mother, a father who had just left, and several children. In the first few minutes, the mother and all but one of the children are brutally murdered, leaving the father devastated when he sees the carnage and his sole surviving son. Fast-forwarding a couple of years, despite establishing hard rules for his son’s safety, his son was kidnapped and held in inhumane conditions. The father does not give up and embarks on a long and challenging journey to find his son again, which he eventually does after facing many difficulties on the way. This movie is called Finding Nemo.

Another example that I could think of is how some individuals will willingly make a dish for consumption using ingredients harvested from cattle – the rich-in nutrients liquid intended for infants of this species – as well as extracting the pulp from a special type of rigid grass. From this there are many variations of the dish, my personal favourite is to combine it with special leaves ground up traditionally by granite stones into a fine powder. Individuals must, unfortunately, wait several hours to consume this dish and must endure the brutal torture of placing said dish into a special bunker, which controls the environment and manipulates the state of matter of the dish into the intended state. Only after a couple of hours can you enjoy the matcha ice cream that you very much deserve.

In this week’s TOK lesson, we moved past narrow sense-perception and considered the concept of perception and interpretation on a different level; how paradigms we hold can influence our understanding and interpretation of things we perceive as “true”, but may not be a universal truth. To be honest, I hadn’t really understood what a paradigm was until this week, but from what I understood from the textbook and from conversations, I came up with this conceptual understanding.

The fact that we “construct” an interpretation of the truth suggests that we will never truly know an objective world. The paradigms we hold are developed from evidence and our sense-making of that evidence, which in turn affects our ability to remain objective if we already have preconceptions hardwired into our thought processing.

When it comes to the way we “construct” our interpretations of the truth, this would relate to the River Boat story (Life on the Mississipi) as the novice steamboat pilot appeared to have very different interpretations of the scene around him compared to his untrained friend. Without trying to repeat the textbook, this seems like a straightforward example of one truth and two outlooks on this truth, presenting a good case for how our view of the world can never truly be objective even if we try. This made me think of the pilot and how he might think his lack of emotion and eye for beauty might make him more objective, when in reality he’s missing out on an entire narrative that is still very valid, even if it doesn’t serve him any purpose. For the second part of the CU — I’m aware there shouldn’t be a second part but I like to consider it as an extension of the first — the pilot must have gone through training and learnt how to take in the evidence around him to draw conclusions that would be more useful and informative than superficial claims about the aesthetics of the scene. It wasn’t always like this though, “I had lost that which could never be restored to me while I lived…I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me”. He had been able to see the purely aesthetic paradigm of the world around him and use that as a method of interpretation, however because he had essentially “relearnt” how to interpret the world and the river, this new paradigm was much more useful to him and perhaps disregarding the ‘less useful’ one became second nature to the point where he had lost the ability to call upon the aesthetic paradigm.

This makes me wonder if there are paradigms stronger, more dominant than others. If there’s something in human behaviour related to survival instincts causing us to automatically assume the most ‘useful’ paradigm to us if it helps us survive. But then this wouldn’t make sense as we can still see beauty today… Maybe-no, our perception has changed definitely since the time when we heavily relied on our survival instincts. But then you could argue that people who specialise in survival and activities in the wilderness, or even the Sentinelese (maybe) would have kept and maybe even refined this paradigm.

One more thought I had about the River Boat Story was that he, the pilot, had once seen the paradigm of beauty, but had been replaced by the other. His friend, on the other hand, had only known the paradigm of beauty and had no clue what the other was like. This could perhaps be implying that we shouldn’t choose ignorance if it’s purely for fear of losing that initial and ‘innocent’ way of interpretation. I don’t know what to think about that.

Last lesson in TOK we spoke a bit about perception and how our reasoning can sometimes be manipulated by knowledge or facts that we may understand to be true, but in reality is not true. We looked at the example of Jimmy Kimmel and the “new iPhone 7”, where they offered the “faster”, “lighter”, and “higher definition” iPhone 7 when in reality it was their old phone. People were led to believe – and with good reason – that they would find these qualities in the phone they were about to receive, so as a pattern-seeking species they looked for these qualities that had suddenly gained importance, possibly causing an effect of exaggeration of these average qualities. Personally, I understood this as a way of saying that our perception of the world around us is pretty malleable and susceptible to many things, not just our own morals and personal thought processes, but also the knowledge that we consume. The first case that this made me think of was how there may be a difference in the way people perceive life and their attitude towards living their life. For example, someone with a terminal condition who knows he has only a few days left to live may carry out their life very differently to a middle-aged adult who’s sick of his mundane life, just as an example.

In a more TOK related instance, something that I thought about was synesthesia; the “perceptual phenomenon” where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to an involuntary experience of another sensory pathway. Instead of external knowledge (eg. in the iPhone instance, the person advertising the phone would be the source of external knowledge) altering one’s perception and understanding of the information, it is the thought process of the individual that changes the way information is processed. Some synesthetes associate colours with numbers or letters, which I imagine would make it much easier to remember Mathematical concepts or strings of numbers as they take something abstract and subconsciously transform it into data that is much easier to perceive. This was the case in 2005 for Daniel Tammet who set the European record for memorising 22,514 pi digits in 5 hours, accrediting his synesthesia as he had his sense of smell, taste and sight to help him remember the digits of pi.

Last lesson in TOK we spoke a bit about perception and how our reasoning can sometimes be manipulated by knowledge or facts that we may understand to be true, but in reality is not true. We looked at the example of Jimmy Kimmel and the “new iPhone 7”, where they offered the “faster”, “lighter”, and “higher definition” iPhone 7 when in reality it was their old phone. People were led to believe – and with good reason – that they would find these qualities in the phone they were about to receive, so as a pattern-seeking species they looked for these qualities that had suddenly gained importance, possibly causing an effect of exaggeration of these average qualities. Personally, I understood this as a way of saying that our perception of the world around us is pretty malleable and susceptible to many things, not just our own morals and personal thought processes, but also the knowledge that we consume. The first case that this made me think of was how there may be a difference in the way people perceive life and their attitude towards living their life. For example, someone with a terminal condition who knows he has only a few days left to live may carry out their life very differently to a middle-aged adult who’s sick of his mundane life, just as an example.

In a more TOK related instance, something that I thought about was synesthesia; the “perceptual phenomenon” where stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to an involuntary experience of another sensory pathway. Instead of external knowledge (eg. in the iPhone instance, the person advertising the phone would be the source of external knowledge) altering one’s perception and understanding of the information, it is the thought process of the individual that changes the way information is processed. Some synesthetes associate colours with numbers or letters, which I imagine would make it much easier to remember Mathematical concepts or strings of numbers as they take something abstract and subconsciously transform it into data that is much easier to perceive. This was the case in 2005 for Daniel Tammet who set the European record for memorising 22,514 pi digits in 5 hours, accrediting his synesthesia as he had his sense of smell, taste and sight to help him remember the digits of pi.