Is seeing really believing?

As most of us have discovered, there are few truths in this universe that are objective. Most of our knowledge is gained through perception, whether it be seeing, listening, touching, smelling, or anything else. The question here is, how reliable are our perceptions? Can we honestly say that we have true knowledge of anything, when we know so little about how the brain functions? Descartes may be able to say ‘I think, therefore I am’, but does that mean we can say ‘I see, therefore I know’? Are there situations where seeing doesn’t mean believing, and perceiving doesn’t mean knowing? We as humans claim to know a lot about our own bodies; however, the brain as an organ remains mainly obscure to us. Hence, there are several ‘special’ cases that stand out when one analyzes the reliability of our senses.

The first limitations come with vision. Human beings gain most of their knowledge from vision, as they get a clear sense of the world surrounding them through sight. From various cases discussed by Dr.Ramachandran, one can observe that vision does not consist merely of seeing, and in fact, there are a number of other activities that go on in one’s brain when one is ‘seeing’. When a person goes blind, everyone would expect them to lose all vision. But as mentioned previously, seeing itself is only a small part of vision. In one case example, a woman named Diane became completely blind, yet she was still able to perform certain functions that one would expect only a person capable of seeing to do. This provides evidence that the sense of vision requires a lot more than seeing, for there is a much more complex series of processes that allow one to perceive visually without the ability to see.

Another fascination phantom of the brain to do with vision was the case in Dr.Ramachandran’s documentary, about a young man who faced an accident, and started believing that his parents were imposters. He would constantly be comparing his ‘imposter mother’ to his ‘real mother’; when in reality they were the same person. I found this case to be extremely thought provoking. There are so many extraterrestrial movies about imposters and aliens, and in every scenario the person facing these visual illusions is observed by society to be psychotic. In this documentary, his illusions were explainable again, by one of the various processes that go into the act of vision. Although Dr.Ramachandran explained such cases scientifically, the paranoid side of me wonders whether or not we really know the answers. Scientists claim to know a lot about the brain, which still remains a mystery, so how can we claim to know the explanations of a case as drastic as this? Who are we to judge whether or not his parents are imposters?

Another case that I found quite interesting was the case of the phantom limb, yet another conundrum which scientists seem to have linked back to vision. The brain, although a complex mechanism, seems to have its flaws, especially when dealing with the trauma of a lost limb. In these cases I am quick to believe the scientific theories, for Dr.Ramachandran’s therapy’s seemed to have cured the patient of the phantom pain in his phantom arm. However, there is also a question of the validity of this theory? Pain has been said to be something of the mind. We do not feel pain physically, for it is merely a signal to the brain, it is an emotional sensation. This being so, couldn’t this phantom pain simply be a mind trick? If all pain is in the mind, and minds are capable of playing tricks, what true knowledge do we really have, if we have any at all?

Essentially, perception and knowledge come hand in hand. Humans cannot gain any knowledge without the act of perception. Even if our actions are not intentional, in our mere consciousness, we perceive the world around us. As demonstrated by these cases, humans are constantly perceiving and storing knowledge that we are not even aware of. This storage of knowledge is what makes our mechanisms of perception so complicated, and therefore so delicate and obscure. We still do not know the various processes that one goes through when perceiving, and for now we are all just relying on our best guesses. Perception will never be one hundred percent validated, and therefore, our knowledge will never be one hundred percent reliable. Small differences and chemical imbalances in our brains can cause such drastic shifts to our perception. Such pieces of evidence make human knowledge on the whole, very insecure. How am I to know if I know anything at all? Like I said before, can I rely on mere ‘seeing’ in order to believe what is really going on?