[Oh babe babe , it's a ] Wild World

Taking TOK as an IB class this year, I’ve learned a lot about perception and to what extent we trust our senses to define our truth. Without our senses, we wouldn’t be who we are. Some people believe that we are the sum of our thoughts, or as Aristotle said the sum of our actions. If one believes this to be true, then without thinking or acting, we would not exist. When I think of existence, I think of living actively. This is a little problematic when it comes to a paralyzed person who has been in a coma for three years. Would I say that this person doesn’t exist? No, that would be rude. Then what exactly is existence? Sometimes when I had a bad day, I ask myself why I exist, what my purpose is in life. Talking to friends and class mates, we compared ourselves to ants, and this got me thinking. We might not be all so different from ants. We like to believe that we are individuals and that we all have our own purpose and our own life. (Existentialist belief: We choose our own destiny). If you think about it, we’re all the same. We’re all going to die one day, whether we brought terror to the world (take Hitler for example) or whether we went to church every day to collect money for the poor. And then we die, and it was all for nothing. Now, one could argue that there are no ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ants, therefore we couldn’t possibly be compared them. That someone must have forgotten that one little ant will end up stabbing the queen of the ant folk to death, to then suck out her smell to finally take over the rule and become queen. It only takes one exception to change everything. Our brains judge our world, and what we see and believe, is what millions of neurons interpreted. In Biology I learned that our bodies only react to certain stimuli of the environment, due to the decision-making of the brain. If the brain were to respond to all stimuli received, we’d all look like we just fled out of a zoo. But even in very familiar situations, the brain judges. The best example of brain judgment that spontaneously comes to my mind is the Nackar cube. I never thought about the significance of these two cubes that I saw, one after another, even though the cube clearly wasn’t moving by an inch. It is unbelievable that one wouldn’t question his trust in vision, after seeing two different cubes in the exact same spot. We trust our senses more than anything, and so we often ignore facts that could ruin this trust. But of course, if we didn’t trust our senses, we wouldn’t exist.