Learning to think for ourselves again
BY ANNA KORSUNSKA (COMD/III)
annak@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
"Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one"
Albert Einstein
I am a bit of a fan of protesting against the commonly accepted norms of the day. Why? Not really because there is anything wrong with them necessarily, but I don't like the trend of passive acceptance. I like to question things.
So, this week I want to throw an idea out to you and have you think about it. What is reality? How can you really know that something is real or true?
Think about it: everything you know goes through your five senses. It goes through your filter of perception first, only then does it exist. If something cannot be perceived by your senses, does it exist? How can you prove it? How can you explain colors to a blind person? Moreover, how can you describe colors to any other person? You can never find out how the world looks like through someone else's eyes. What is reality then?
Our whole system of understanding of reality is based on making guesses and finding evidence that supports those guesses. Our sense of reality is confined to the limits of our minds and our senses. It seems silly, then, to me, that people have this God-complex of thinking that we know everything, that there is nothing else left outside experience. Any new ideas that are different from our current ''reality'' are automatically rejected. You'd think that people would have learned their lesson from our history: Hundreds of years ago people thought the Earth was flat. And the people who said otherwise were, at best, shunned and called crazy. Even earlier, people didn't understand the process of weather, so they assigned gods to each element of weather. We like to explain things and protest against any opposition to our theories. And we protest so strongly, until so much time passes, and so much evidence is found, that we suddenly change our minds and wonder how we could ever have been so stupid to think otherwise.
It really is so sad for me that so many of the popular things in our world today are set at getting people into a state of passive acceptance of anything. An obvious example is the use of subliminal advertising, advertising that targets the subconscious, and we are not aware of it, although it has a very strong effect on us. And you never know the whole story, how, when, and what can have some kind of effect on our minds. But we reject the idea, because we reject anything that isn't instant and obvious.
Ultimately, reality is what we imagine it to be. If we don't, then we will be simply accepting someone else's reality. The choice is yours.