Topics Knowledge

Question I've been told that your eyes only see what your mind imagines is there. So how do we know what is there and what it looks like? Do people see other people differently? But if all this is true and people saw what they thought then if they were a negative person then everything would go bad for them; in this sense, in a football game the negative person would see a dropped pass when a positive person would see a touch down. Hope you can answer. DJ

Accepted:
October 24, 2005

Comments

I agree with you: people don't seem to see only what they are thinking, because negative people sometimes see positive things, and because we are all sometimes surprised by what we see. But to this one might reply that we can be surprised in dreams, even if in dreams we see only what was in some sense already in our minds.

Your general question may be how we know that everything we see isn't just a dream. This is a classic philosophical worry, made particularly famous by Descartes in his First Meditation. (If you want to read this wonderful piece, click on 'Early Modern Texts' on the lower right hand corner of this page.) Many philosophers would say, with regret, that we can't prove that what we see isn't all our dream, but nobody believes it in their ordinary lives. And as I've said, the fact that we are sometimes surprised by what we see does suggest that we aren't making the whole thing up. Interestingly, the fact that we are also often not surprised suggests the same thing. What I mean by this is that the world we see exhibits remarkable order and consisency, at many levels, and it seems must more likely that this is because there really is an orderly and consistent world out there that we are seeing, rather that our mind (0r anyone else's mind) is organising everything in our experience to that level of detail.