Naushin Chowdhury
January 30th, 2014
1. In his TED talk, Beau Lotto says “Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature. Okay? We are not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We’re defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment – by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical, and empirical.” What do you think Lotto’s statement means for sense perception as a WOK?
Sense perception is a physical response of any of our 5 senses – taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight – to external stimuli. When we interact with these stimuli, sensory information is sent to our brains in the form of electrical impulses, which is then interpreted …show more content…
These beliefs can be tied to certain emotions, seeping into our ability to reason and resulting in prejudiced decisions; emotion can be considered a limitation to reason. In middle school, I had a friend that looked down upon the LGBT community, saying that they didn’t belong and treating them rudely in public places. Although at first her choices seemed very irrational, I soon realized that this thinking was partially in response to the influences she was exposed to – her parents were strict Christians that also looked down upon the LGBT community. The anger and hatred tied to her beliefs were what drove her to make the choice of harbouring negative feelings towards these people in the first place, and also gave her the illusion that her reasoning was justifiable.
We can also use reason to recognize the biases of our own experiences. This is an important process because it helps us to become more open-minded individuals and learn from mistakes made in the past so as not to make them again in the future. However, emotion can interfere prevent us from identifying bias, or make us think it doesn’t exist. To this day, my friend still feels the same way about the LGBT community. Multiple times, I have tried talking to her, telling her that they should not be considered different, but every time she replies, “You’re the one being