My Thoughts on "Jabberwocky"

The genre of the poem is fantasy. It is quite obvious because there is no creature that looks like the "Jabberwocky" as originally illustrated in the Looking Glass. The poem is constructed of many words that I can't find in the dictionary and words that I found but have never heard of before, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. However, I do get the plot of the poem:
A young man travelled through the woods one day, in which lived a lot of dangerous creatures. His mother had warned him so. When he was resting, the Jabberwocky attacks. But he fought it and killed it in the end. Then he brings home the creature's chopped off head to show off his bravery.

With many unknown words, the poem appears to be very weird to me. This makes me think that something we don't acknowledge doesn't make it false. Maybe the poet is trying to express that knowledge is infinite and there is yet so much which we don't know, or, that we shouldn't judge something as being weird just because it doesn't make sense to us.

To What Extent is Sense Preception an Accurrate Ways of Knowing - Elise Tam

Sense perception is a way of knowing as with senses we learn many things such has how something looks, sound, feel, taste and smell. However, without our understanding and reason we do not know what we are seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling.

During class, we watched videos where they "trick" our perception. Colour changes were being made while we were focused on a particular action or object. Even so we do not "see" the changes, I think we do perceive the changes of color and things that we are not focused on but our reason and understanding ignore it and push it to the back. As we are focused onto other things, our mind believes that what we see is insignificant.

Most of us are all born with our senses; however unlucky individuals may not be born with fully functional senses such as people with hearing disability. This does not affect our learning of knowledge through senses as there are other senses to replace that sense lost such as for hearing disability, we can see and learn to read lips. However, losing all senses would be impossible to use senses as a way of knowing and that person would have trouble with communicating and understanding the world around us.

Conclusion, without sense perception it would be very hard to know knowledge as sense is the primary basic factor to it. We are still able to survive without one of our senses but can you imagine not having all? We would be unable to do many of the things we do now. It is the fault of our reason that we could get perception wrong; therefore it is an accurate way of knowing.

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To What Extent is Sense Perception an Accurate way of Knowing?

I believe that sense perception is a pretty accurate way of knowing because afterall, we can only taste, smell, hear, touch and see things around us so we must make do with what we are provided with because if we were to not believe in our senses at all then how would one be able to live each day.
Of course our senses may not always be as accurate or 'safe' as we expected because from the "card changing magic trick" which our sight senses immediatly tell us to look out for the card changing but infact whilst the so called "trick" was being performed, the whole stage and setting was changed which during most of the time, I myself could not notice. This brings highlights the harsh reality as to wether we can really trust our sense perception because by switching the situation with something in our daily lives,the outcome could be disasterous or even tradgic. The other astonishing point is that we can focus so hard that we shut out other senses which could give a more accurate evaluation of the situation, because in the video, after watching through the second time, the noise made by the crew in the background is actually quite obvious but because we focus on trying to figure out the magic trick, we tend to channel all our attention for the use of one sense and deem other things as insignificant such as the noise.
Overall, I don't think that our sense perceptions are an inaccurate way of knowing because they can be accurate but to a certain degree to how much we focus on something. The point we can take from such videos as the card changing magic trick or the gorilla clip is that yes we can focus and be as "accurate" as possible in a sense, but what it is trying to say is that by focusing so hard, we may tend to shut out our other senses which shows how inaccurate we may be to the 'real picture' which in the card changing magic trick, isn't really the cards that we should be worrying about!

To what extent is sense perception an accurate way of knowing?

Sense perception, i think is like a guide for us to make decisions, but not the one which gives the answer for the decision. However it is suprising to see people, keeping on depending on the sense perception to seek for answer.
I would like to say we seriously shouldn't fully depend on it. We have to make overall decision from our knowledge, using the evidence given by the sense perception. I feel like the life is like full of problem solving questions; to make sure we make the decisions right, sense perception should be used as a small guide/half broken compass (?).

First of all, we have to know sense perception, these sharpest tool of ours can even make mistakes. For example, the class was given a video and was told to count how many times people in white t-shirt were passing. From the video screen, there were few people wearing white and some wearing black t-shirts. One person from two teams was given a basket ball. Then the video started and all the people were starting to concerntrate on how many times people were passing the ball. After few minutes, the teacher stopped the video and asked the class first about the number of passes. Of course they were able to answer this first. However, the next question, they weren't able to answer. The next question from the teacher was 'what did you see also?'
Well, everybody was only concerntrating on the ball, so nobody was able to answer the question. So then the teacher replayed the video. Now all the people were able to understand the teacher's question. There was a gorrilla, it actually passed through the players and disappeared. It was so easy enough to see but nobody noticed it. It made the most of the students feel slight dumb as they didn't see the gorilla which was right in front of them. Therefore sense perception shouldn't be trusted fully.

However, even though, sense perception makes mistakes, but we still need them half fully. For example, there is a person driving a car and is using the map as the only source which tells the direction of the place. This person has no idea where the place is. However, the person knows that the map s/he is holding right now has some mistakes and because of the map s/he already had been lost few times .But without the map, the person will be having no idea of the place s/he is situated in. Therefore, the person has no choice but to use the map to get extra information about the place but decides not to fully believe it and uses it as a guide to make an overall decision by her/himself. Sense perception is like that map. Even though, it makes mistakes (makes wrong decisions), like the map, sense perception is the best source to support us from making an overall decision.

It is very suprising by the fact that our sense perception, our most reliable source even makes mistakes. It is very depressing to know that our last ever source even is unreliable. However, we still need them and is the best source for supporting us on making the best decision.

Sense perception - deceiving?

I believe that sense perception is an accurate way of knowing on a practical scale. This is because there would be no other way of gaining new knowledge in this universe. Reason alone can draw new knowledge but only if that knowledge was derived from our sense perception. On a practical scale, we can use our senses for gathering knowledge in everyday life and therefore be able to manage it.

The accuracy of our sense perceptions and how much we can trust it therefore depends on our experiential knowledge we have gained from the past.

Immediately, from the very start of our lives, our sense perception is not entirely accurate. Our brain, for example, makes up part of what we see in our field of vision. This is the blind spot which is caused by a lack of photosensitive receptor cells.

Television is an example of how our senses can deceive our way of knowing. It can replicate sounds in reality and what we see in reality. It can show what is really happening in reality and it can give us information through our senses that fool our way of knowing. For example the great spaghetti hoax in 1957 on the BBC led television viewers to believe that spaghetti came from spaghetti trees.

Our senses can never be used to perceive everything in reality. For example, our sense of sight cannot perceive ultraviolet light waves. We may see the effects of ultraviolet light waves such as exposing photographic film but we must use reason to deduce what has happened in order to understand it. This view was argued by Kant in that we should not be one-sided with our way of knowing the world but that we should be autonomous and draw from reason and from our senses.

To What Extent is Sense of Perception an Accurate Way of Knowing?

In psychology, perception is defined as the interpretation of information received through our sensations.

When we see things it is not our eyes that 'see' but our brain. The way we 'perceive' or in other words, interpret things can be distorted by our previous knowledge or by our surroundings. Prejudice and discrimination are also based on this - we generalise what we've learnt in the past and then judge things by the same basic simply on the way they look. When thinking of it this way, perception becomes an inaccurate and biased way of knowing. In addition, it is a common belief that we 'see' only what we want to see and what we are told to see.

This belief leads to quite frightening thoughts. How much of what we 'perceive' in everyday life should we believe and trust in? And how much do we manage to miss without noticing such as in the gorilla experiment and the card colour changing experiment? When looking at it in this perspective our perception is not accurate at all and we are easily tricked by it.

In conclusion, I don't think that we can measure to what extent perception is accurate as there are also many other factors that may affect what we know. As mentioned before, we have past experience first of all and when put in different situations the things we see or notice will also be different.

As odd as it sounds, I do not believe there is any accurate way of knowing whether our senses are an accurate presentation of the world. This is because I think that everyone's minds have a little "glitch" and therefore somehow has an impact on the way we see/perscieve the world.

You may see something that is not there, it could have been just a leaf buzzing by and not a super-intellegent microbug sent out by an underground organisation to destroy all of you shoes. Your brain is wired to see, do, feel, taste and hear to a certain extent but when we are constrating we miss things because our minds are more concerned with what we are giving all of our attention to. When we do see something, a leaf buzzing by for example, our minds make an assumtion and try to "guess" what we just saw. Of course we cannot rely on our senses 100% otherwise a large percentage of Earth's population would believe that 'The Sound of Music' is being preformed live under their beds and not think it is just their imagination. Scary stuff, eh?

To What Extent is Sense of Perception an Accurate Way of Knowing?

Our sense of perception is our only option for perceiving the world we come into contact with everyday. The absence of any of our senses can lead to chaos since we were born to rely on them. Although they may seem very useful, there are examples when we miss out something that is around us because our attention has been diverted into a different thing. For instance, many people missed out the Gorilla when trying to count the number of passes made. Our attention has been diverted onto the ball instead of the scenery as a whole, and thus we miss out on the gorilla. Another example of the flaws of our senses is the card changing magic trick. When we see the name of this video, our brains automatically divert all our attention onto the colour of the card instead of the scenary as a whole again. And therefore, we miss out on the colour changes on the background. Even though our ears hear the crew attempting to change the colours, our brain automatically perceives it to be some insignificant noise which we can ignore.

I believe that our senses are only accurate to a certain extent when our attention is diverted to a certain object. I think the evidence is not trying to disprove the accuracy of our senses but is only trying to tell us not to focus on a point in a way that we ignore the things that are happening around us.

To What Extent is Sense of Perception an Accurate Way of Knowing?

Sense of perception is an important way of knowing, for sure, because without it there is much that we would not otherwise be able to learn. How accurate it is is totally different. Our sense of perception is accurate in that most times it tells us what we need to know. For example we wanted to know what the texture of an orange was, both its skin and the fruit itself. We would use our hands and be able to feel that the orange was not quite smooth, and was slightly bumpy. Through our tasting, we would be able to know that the orange is sweet, and possibly slightly sour. In this sense, it is an accurate way of knowing, because it provides us with an accurate feel of what an orange is like. Sense is an accurate way of knowing, because it gathers experience from all over to provide us with a knowledge bank of how different things look, taste, feel, smell, or sound like.

However, when these senses are fooled into thinking that an object is something else, then it is not accurate. For example, if we were not allowed to use any other senses other than our sight, and there were two glasses. One is filled with water, the other clear vinegar, we could easily be fooled into believing the glass with water was actually vinegar. This information is clearly false, and so causes our sight to not be an accurate way of knowing. Also, senses are useful only as long as we can actually sense them. This is to say that, quite often we simply overlook things and do not notice it. What we do not notice, cannot be known to us, and so cannot be an accurate way of knowing.

It is evident that our senses are very important to us in our daily lives, and that we rely on them a lot. However, there are instances where these senses fail us as an accurate way of knowing, and must use other methods as our accurate way of knowing.

To what extent is sense of perception an accurate way of knowing?

In my point of view, our sense of perception is an accurate way of knowing to the extent that one can see, smell, hear, taste and touch. I believe that without the perception of senses, we don’t learn anything as life would be impossible without them. In a way, all the five senses are inter-connected to learning something. For example, cooking, we use our sight to learn from television and we use our ears to listen to the instructions. We use our smell, taste and touch when cooking the food. Finally, one perfects the art of cooking. In other words, one learns cooking with an accurate sense of perception and the use of all five senses.

In Tok lesson, we saw a video of two teams passing the basketball, one team in white and the other in black where while we all are focusing on the number of times the ball was passed, we didn’t realize that a gorilla walks by, dances and we had no clue of it. It may be that my sight is not accurate however when we watch the video of the "best changing color card trick ever", we don’t see that the t-shirt colors of the host changes, the table cover changes and the back-ground changes too. This doesn’t mean that we doubt our sense of perception, all it is that our senses can focus on only one thing and not everything at once.

Though it is true that our senses can trick us, when we come to think of it, our senses keep us safe when there is a danger and as we grow up we learn to use it more accurately. Therefore, even though our senses are not accurate, our way of learning through them is definitely accurate.

To what extent is sense perception an accurate way of knowing?

Our sense of perception is something which humans rely on to learn and react. However, there are cases when we are deceived only because we aren't concentrating on it. For example, the gorilla in the basketball experiment was something which our visual senses didn't see because we were merely concentrating on the number of times the basketball was being passed. What makes it interesting is how we easily our senses of perception can be tricked when we are told or shown something to concentrate on. In the case of the magic card trick video, we weren’t told anything about what to watch out for however the title of the video ,the colour changing card trick, lead us to concentrating solely on the cards which meant we ‘shut out’ what was going on in the background. Such subtle changes can make a significant difference as shown in the past such as Hitler’s influence to kill the Jews. Although our sense of perception is has flaws, we have no other options but to trust our senses in making the correct decision.

ToK Homework Task 2

To what extent is sense perception an accurate way of knowing?

Although as incredible as our senses are, they indeed have faults. Our senses seemingly allow us to view the world in a number of ways, objectively. However the exercising of these methods to experience sensations can lead to misconceptions and errors, even for the very ‘sharpest’ of us. Therefore it can be argued that the appreciation of the physical approach can be harmful. But then again what other approaches are there? If anyone of us were devoid of all five existing senses (i.e. sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste) how else would we communicate with the rest of the world? How would we continue learning and thus knowing about new things? We could presume and make groundless assumptions but then again what would warrant such speculations? This however only applies to future considerations. By building on past knowledge we can accept or reject projected ‘truths’, with only our mind defining our verdict. However to be shifted towards such projected ‘truths’ one must be familiar with some form of evidence or drive no matter how minimal. Evidence which is physical which again counters this argument. In conclusion it would seem sense perception is not an entirely accurate way of knowing but that we unconditionally rely upon it.

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To what extent is sense perception an accurate way of knowing?

With the red-tinted glasses experiment from Sophie’s World as an example, we can say that what our mind learns from our five senses doesn’t necessarily have to be the truth. Whether we think our senses are telling us the truth is up to our personal judgment.

I think that my senses are an accurate way of knowing, because life would be impossible if we don’t have any of them. The gorilla video experiment in TOK lesson didn’t change my view on the reliability of our senses. We weren’t able to spot the gorilla because we weren’t concentrating, which was due to our mind thinking to focus on the basketball. When we focus, it’s not our senses that are doing so but our brain. The image of the gorilla would have been seen by our sight, but our mind blocked it out. Basically, our brain controls our senses. Although I have to admit that we focused our eyes on the ball because we listened to Ms Woollett. It is very scary how sometimes we just take orders that are aimed to make us not notice some truths, without even knowing so. Another example, from my everyday life, is that I don’t hear what someone is saying to me when I concentrate on watching television. What that person says would sound like some slurred up sound to me, instead of words that have meanings. Again, it was because I diverted my mind on something else.

Of course, people may argue that our senses and the brain work together for us to “experience”, and so it can be our senses’ fault. But if we don’t rely on our senses, how else can we learn things? There is no other way, so I say our senses are our most accurate way of knowing.