Five Senses Ability

The five senses are one of the ways for a human being to interact with the world and gain intellect. For instance, we use our vision in order to identify different colors and matter in general. Our five senses are also our primary source of intellect as we make use of this to gain basic knowledge such as counting, color identification and etc. However we may pose a question to this statement; to what extent are our senses actually reliable in gaining intellect? Even if we use our senses to obtain basic knowledge, there are cases where your senses may actually deceive you. For example, optical illusions are a distortion of our vision as it reveals how the brain recognizes matter but interprets it differently. With this question posed to the

For instance, if a person is given two pictures with one being colored and the other being black and white; the person may assume that the picture that is black and white is older compared to the other picture. This is an example where the sense of vision has affected his perception in such a way that the person assumed that the black and white picture is older. Our senses play a big role in our lives as we instinctively rely on them in believing what we see and having our own perception through our senses. The person in the example may be right but there are also consequences in relying on your sense perception as a way of knowing. The person in the example assumed that the black and white picture is older but he was merely saying this because he has relied on his sense perception and made an assumption out of it. However, the picture could be a deception where the picture was merely filtered in black and white and the “colored” picture was actually older. Our senses are necessary in gaining intellect as we have our own perceptions through our senses but there are limitations in relying too much on our sense perception. As seen in the example, relying on our senses have a risk of being prone to false conclusions and

Illusions by its definition detorts our perception we intake through our senses. This is another limitation of the reliability of sense perception as your senses may actually deceive your thoughts and perspective that you intake from your senses. Some examples of illusions can be the optical and audio illusions. A German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz stated a theory that we construct images in our minds by inferring the whole based on our experiences. In other words, we convert the unclear pictures generated by our eyes into something that makes sense based on our understanding of the world. For instance, psychologists have stated that humans are prone to being deceived by illusions as we tend to look at the illusion to the way we understand the illusion itself. This is prone to error as our understanding of the illusion can be different to what is actually present. If we rely too much on what we see, we are also prone to making false conclusions and