Essay On Perception And Understanding.docx

Till the start of the 17th Century, we humans have relied upon just our mere senses to gain an understanding of reality, which have brought about significant errors, erroneous conclusions, and consequently, false beliefs. When we used tools to augment our senses and perceive nature, did we realize our misinterpretations and false beliefs, such as in the case of Tyco Brahi and Galileo Galilei. This tells us that we will always base our understanding upon what we perceive, no matter how limited it may be. Plato’s cave is an excellent example of this. It shows that people in a cave, oblivious to the world outside and the fire behind them, will always see shadows on the wall and base their understanding upon those shadows, whether they depict dancing people or a standing person. What happens in the real world will be totally elusive to them and they will fail to understand real-world phenomena as they have never perceived it before (due to their limitations). Such a limited understanding will, therefore, cause them to adopt different worldviews. When the Greeks tried to explain the skies, the above example held quite true. Unable to perceive the motion of our planet clearly, they adopted a geocentric model to explain their observations of the sun and the skies moving. They, instead, based their understanding on religious grounds, that humans were to be the centre of the universe because of their importance as mentioned in the Bible. HOWEVER, when Copernicus put forward the heliocentric model based on the ideas of symmetry and mathematical reasoning, the entire worldview changed and people started to adopt Copernicus’ model as a description of reality. As more careful, precise, and detailed observations were made by Tyco Brahi and Galileo Galilei through their tools, our understanding grew, and what seemed to be crystal spheres became elliptical orbits. The entire understanding was shattered through empirical evidence. Therefore, it is safe to say that there are always limits to what we can perceive, either in our senses or in our instruments; but in the end, it is what we perceive that determines what we understand about nature. The best we can do is to be as careful in taking measurements with our current instruments as we can to make the best use of them until new tools arrive to help us in our perception.