Is seeing believing? I have never thought about it during the past twenty four years. And perhaps most of us just ignore this important question either. Now I will try to reflect on it.
After some light goes into our eyes and active the retina, our brain will get the signal and then create the image. It depends on our eyes and is based on our brain. In other words, it is just a reflection of the physical world. When we talk about believing something, we assume it should be rational and we can call it knowledge. Plato, a great Greek philosopher, came up with an idea named Allegory of the Cave in his work, the Republic. It shows that we humans are living in a shadow of the actual world. This is so depressing, because it means that all the things we see are just like a dream and vast majority of us can not know the real knowledge. So is seeing believing?
As a matter of fact, this question is like a ghost hovering in the human civilization. Take perceptual psychology for example. Perceptual psychology focuses on the recognition and processing of stimuli and memory in the brain. It aims to find out the connections between the psychological activity of and the senses of human beings like seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and so on. Magic show is a convincing example of their ideas. When you watch the close-up magic performance, you may be amazed by what you have seen. When the train disappeared in front of your eyes, when the magician is cut in half by the electric saw, ” Oh, my God! It is impossible”. You may blurt out the words. Yeah, it is really happened under your very eyes. But you know that the train is still there and the magician is not hurt by the terrible machine. The things we mentioned above are simple but worth thinking deeply about. There is a theory in perceptual psychology, we see things that we expect to see and brain can overrule the eyes sometimes. They also think illusions are the bridge of inner working and the real world. According to Collins Dictionary, anillusionis something that appears to exist or be a particular thing but does not actually exist orisin reality something else.
This makes it even harder to get the true knowledge, but we just make a first step, that is awareing of the difference between seeing and believing. And next we should do is following the direction of Philosophers of the past. It can be concluded as rational, objective and metaphysical. It is building a way of thinking, it is a spirit of questioning, and it is a curiosity of exploring the world. As Newton said "I am just like a boy playing on the seashore, from time to time to pick up more wonderful smooth stones or more beautiful shells, and in front of me is a completely unexplored wide sea of truth."
