Linking Questions / Theory of Reality

October 18, 2017

Linking Questions

Ethics
Do good people see the world differently from bad people?
What does it mean to be a good or bad person? A person cannot be fully bad all the time and a person cannot be purely good all the time. It depends on the circumstances they are going through which affects their perspective of the world. For example, having a bad day at school can give me a negative outlook on the things around me.

Religion
What role does interpretation play in religious experience?
Interpretation plays the role of filling in the blanks. Interpretation is quite broad in a sense. Some people would read a verse from the Bible and understand it in a literal sense or some would read the verse as a metaphor and interpret that to apply it to themselves/others. Interpretation opens up a world of confusion, conflict/debate on who’s right and who’s wrong.

Language
How does the way we describe something affect the way we see it?
We describe things in our own perspective with our own prejudices/biases. Furthermore, when we describe things to a person, it can affect the person’s outlook - due to the connotations behind certain words. There is the describer and the receiver. If the describer is attracted to curvier women, rather than describing them as ‘fat/big’ they would describe them as ‘voluptuous/curvaceous’.

Emotion
How does your mood affect your perception of things?
If you feel exhausted/demotivated, everything seems like a lot of hard work and nothing is easy consequently, you tend to have a negative perspective on things - you can easily look at a difficult task and say it’s impossible. On the other hand, if you feel empowered and motivated, you can look at a difficult task as a challenge and work towards achieving your goal.

Theory of Reality

Scientific Realism
‘Atoms in the void’
What appears in our sights are atoms combined to form objects, people, images to fill in a void. ‘The familiar, comfortable, sensuous world of our everyday experience vanishes and is replaced by a colorless, soundless, odorless realm of atoms whizzing around in empty space.


Common-sense 
‘What you see is what is there’
What we see in front of us is how it actually is in reality. Our sight shows the truth as our sight mirrors the way the world is. 


Phenomenalism 
‘All knowledge must ultimately be based on experience.’
George Berkeley (1685-1753) “To be is to be perceived”
What we know comes from our experience of reality, but beyond that, there’s nothing. Phenomenalism insists that we can only judge and speak of things that we have experienced in our own perspective - furthermore, we have no right to speak of things beyond what we know - ultimately about reality.